(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which operates under the United States Secretary of the Interior, has changed the “derogatory” and “inappropriate” name of Yellowstone National Park’s Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain.
As part of Yellowstone’s 150th anniversary, officials announced the 10,551-foot high peak formerly called Mount Doane is now First Peoples Mountain. https://t.co/Y0QKMDG2ps
— NPR (@NPR) June 12, 2022
The mountain’s namesake, Civil War veteran Lt. Gustavus Doane, “helped lead an attack on a band of Piegan Blackfeet in northern Montana” in 1870 and “bragged for the rest of his life about what become known as the Marias Massacre,” in which at least 173 Native Americans were killed, according to the Associated Press.
The name-change echoes a Democrat tradition started by former President Barack Obama to unilaterally rename historic landmarks. Obama took particular pleasure in sticking it to Republicans when he renamed, at his leftist whim, North America’s tallest peak, Mt. McKinley, to its original native moniker of Denali.
In a press release, Yellowstone National Park described the process that led to the change. for Mount Doane.
“Based on recommendations from the Rocky Mountain Tribal Council, subsequent votes within the Wyoming Board of Geographic names, and with support of the National Park Service, the name was forwarded to the BGN for a vote in June 2022,” the release said.
“The name change will be reflected in The Domestic Names Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) in the coming days.”
In a statement issued last week, Piikani Nation Chief Stan Grier said the change was long overdue.
“We all agreed on ‘First Peoples’ Mountain’ as an appropriate name to honor the victims of such inhumane acts of genocide, and to also remind people of the 10,000-year-plus connection tribal peoples have to this sacred place now called Yellowstone,” Grier told the AP.
Blackfeet Tribal member Tom Rodgers told CNN that the name change amounts to a “reckoning with history.”
“We heard our Blackfeet sisters screams as they ran to the river on that cold January morning in 1870,” he said. “It has taken far far too long for this journey of healing to arrive.”
