U.S. Will Rename 660 Mountains, Rivers and More to Remove Racist Word

One mountain, named with a racist slur and slated for renaming, is located in Routt County in northern Colorado near the state's border with Utah. Carol M. Highsmith Archive / Library of Congress

The United States Department of the Interior (DOI) proposed a list of new names for more than 660 geographic features across the country last month, the agency announced in a statement.

Led by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as cabinet secretary, the February 2022 release of the list marks the next step in a sweeping plan to remove the racist and misogynist slur “squaw” from the national geographic landscape. Hundreds of U.S. geographic sites, including mountains, rivers, lakes, remote islands and more, currently are named using the word, report Neil Vigdor and Christine Hauser for the New York Times.

By Nora McGreevy