Story at a glance
- A statement from the National Park Service said the name change resulted from research showing Doane led the 1870 Marias Massacre where at least 173 American Indians, including children and the elderly, were killed.
- Yellowstone said it reached out to all 27 tribes associated with the park and received no opposition to the name change.
- U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced in November the agency would create a process to review and replace derogatory place names on federal lands.
Yellowstone National Park announced Thursday it changed the name of Mount Doane to First People’s Mountain as part of a larger effort to remove offensive place names in national parks.
The announcement follows a unanimous vote by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to rename the 10,551-foot peak originally honoring the explorer and massacre leader Gustavus Doane.
A statement from the National Park Service said the name change resulted from research showing Doane led the 1870 Marias Massacre where at least 173 American Indians, including children and the elderly, were killed. The attack was carried out in response to the alleged murder of a white fur trader.
“Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged about it for the rest of his life,” the park service statement read.
Yellowstone said it reached out to all 27 tribes associated with the park and received no opposition to the name change.
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced in November the agency would create a process to review and replace derogatory place names on federal lands.
“Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands. Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” Haaland said at the time.
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A team of researchers created a tool earlier this year to identify and change place names in national parks that are deemed harmful or rooted in white supremacy. They analyzed 2,241 place names in 16 national parks across the U.S. and developed “decision trees” which enable them to group together place names with similar origins. The categories included language origin; derogatory; erasure; and dimensions of racism and colonialism.
The team found 214 names that were appropriated without an Indigenous community’s consent, 254 names that memorialize colonialism and 21 names that commemorate historical figures with ties to racist ideas. The study said each of the 16 parks contained at least one place name for figures who supported racist ideologies or profited from Indigenous colonization or genocide.
“There’s a process by which those names are chosen,” said study co-author and Oregon State University associate professor Natchee Barnd. “And if we’re operating within a system that has been grounded in white supremacy, it’s probably going to reflect that — some really explicitly and vehemently, and some by default or accidentally, such as the fact that a name is in English.”
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