All U.S. town and landmark names containing the word 'Squaw' must change. Indigenous groups support these mandates, but Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig is not on board.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law last month to remove the word ‘Squaw’ from nearly 100 landmarks and place names across California. Native Americans and others are celebrating the new law because they find the term 'Squaw' offensive. But in Squaw Valley, an unincorporated area outside of Fresno, some residents want to keep the name. And Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig is siding with them. Read the transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times reporter Lila Seidman
More reading: New law will remove the word ‘squaw’ from California place names
Native Americans want to ditch the name Squaw Valley. A county supervisor says context matters
Retiring its racist name, historic Squaw Valley resort will become Palisades Tahoe
Gustavo Arellano: Over the past year, the U.S. Department of the Interior has changed the names of hundreds of rivers, mountains, parks and other geographic sites on federal land because they used racist terms.
That push … has now reached the Golden State.
NEWS CLIP: A new law will remove the word “squaw” from nearly 100 landmarks and place names across California.
Gustavo Arellano: That word means “woman” in some Native American languages. But over the centuries, others turned it into a slur aimed at Indigenous women. And today, some say it's as offensive, as misogynistic, as any other anti-woman insult you could imagine.
So Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill last month that's going to strip the term from the names of towns, parks, lakes and other places across California.
Gustavo Arellano: Native Americans and others are celebrating the new law. But these are names that, in some places, date back generations. So in a place like, say, Squaw Valley, not everyone's happy.
Crosstalk: You're trying to change history.…
Squaw is not a California Indian word. Squaw? No it's not.
[yelling back and forth]
Gustavo Arellano: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News From the LA Times.” It's Monday, Oct. 24, 2022.
Today, why the fight to remove the word “squaw” from public spaces is still raging on despite the new laws.
Gustavo Arellano: Lila Seidman is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has covered this controversy. Lila, welcome to The Times.
Lila Seidman: Thanks so much for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: So where is Squaw Valley and what's it like?
Lila Seidman: So in people's minds when you say Squaw Valley, they often immediately think of Squaw Valley Ski Resort, which is no longer called Squaw Valley. The owners of that famous ski resort, which hosted the Olympics in the ’60s, changed its name proactively last year because the owners they researched the history of the name and they decided it was offensive and changed it. There's another Squaw Valley, which is a bit south of that ski resort, and it's a small, unincorporated community of, I believe, like, 3,600 people. And it's tucked below the mountains of King Canyon National Park, and it's about 30 minutes from Fresno.
Gustavo Arellano: So that word has long been used in United States popular culture. I remember hearing it even in Warner Bros. cartoons. So I think a lot of people are surprised to learn that many people think it's offensive. What's the word’s actual history?
Lila Seidman: So like many things, there is a significant debate about the origin of this word.
Many scholars believe that it came from the Algonquian language, which was spoken by many different tribes and originally essentially meant woman. So it was not offensive in that context. But when white settlers came, they sort of turned it into something darker.
Lila Seidman: Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute and a leading Native American rights advocate, told me “squaw” was actually popularized by French and British trappers who took Indigenous women as slave laborers as early as the 1600s. And when they used this word, it was offensive. They were basically calling them women's private parts, and it wasn't a nice thing.
Gustavo Arellano: OK, so if it’s offensive, why are people in Squaw Valley pushing back against changing the name of it?
Lila Seidman: So it is largely considered offensive. And in fact, in November, the U.S. secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, who is Native American, said this is an offensive term, particularly against Native American women. But there is in particular one Fresno County supervisor who has been very vocal about this term not being offensive to him and some other people in the community in this particular context.
Nathan Magsig: My name is Nathan Magsig and I'm a supervisor here in Fresno County representing the 5th District.
Lila Seidman: And he has argued that there should not be a blanket prohibition on the term, this term or other terms. His argument is that context matters, and in the context of the town's history, he does not find this word “squaw” to be offensive.
Nathan Magsig: So in Fresno County, there are many who believe that the way that Squaw Valley got its name was there is an impression in a rock of a woman's foot. And when early settlers came here, they also recognized and saw that there were many women that were in this particular valley. And so as a way to pay homage to those women, it was deemed as Squaw Valley.
Lila Seidman: So their argument is that, this is part of our history and we have pride for our community and we associate our community with this name.
Gustavo Arellano: And what about the people who do want the name of the town to change?
Lila Seidman: So according to Roman Rain Tree, the Native American activist who has really been spearheading the name change, he does not use the word “squaw.” He considers it the equivalent of the C-word, so a deeply offensive and sexist term.
Roman C. Rain Tree: When you find another Native gathering where the public is open, attend it and then go find your nearest elderly woman and call 'em that. See what happens. I would be willing to bet it won't be received well and you might be having a gathering of people coming to her defense.
Lila Seidman: He brought this to the attention of the supervisor, Supervisor Magsig, in the summer of 2020. Ever since then, the two have had a contentious relationship, and Roman Rain Tree essentially told me that he was given the cold shoulder.
Roman C. Rain Tree: He began to really label me as an outsider. He doesn't live in this community. He lives in Fresno. He was dismissive of my ancestral roots.
Lila Seidman: For a long time. Raintree had pushed Magsig to hold a community meeting and Magsis in turn had wanted Raintree to hold a community meeting.
Roman C. Rain Tree: The supervisor kept telling the community it was upon me to host a meeting in the S Valley. And I said, You know what, I'm not a supervisor. I don't have the resources. And besides, it's your district. You work for them. I don't work for them and you should do it.
Lila Seidman: So you could imagine this was an impasse that lasted for quite some time. Rain Tree ended up holding a Zoom meeting.
Zoom Meeting: Well, welcome. Thank you for everybody attending. It's an honor to have you here.
Lila Seidman: And that attracted mostly supporters.
Zoom: And this speaks to the main opponent of the rename campaign, Nathan Magsig, who has argued that time and time again and again, it speaks to the issue of this just being, a slur, derogatory and racist period.
Lila Seidman: Just the other month, Magsig finally did hold a community meeting. And keep in mind this was after the secretary of the Interior had deemed this term offensive and ordered it removed from federal land. And a state law was about to be signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which would remove it from California land. And this meeting drew hundreds of people and most of the attendees opposed the name change.
Crosstalk: I'm a white chick, straight up. But I have four or five different tribes in me. I'm, I'm the albino of the bunch. Nice. OK, that being said, why are you turning your back on your heritage? What's the deal with “squaw”?
Lila Seidman: You know, when Rain Tree tried to speak, there were a lot of people heckling him.
Crosstalk: Can you explain to me how I'm turning my back on my heritage? It's a derogatory word, one that I've always had a negative…. Memories connected to the land are not memories connected to that word.
Lila Seidman: And some other people mentioned, you know, we have to make this change, so this debate is moot. Those people were shouted down.
Crosstalk: We're not gonna be able to keep the name. That's just the truth. And Mr. Magsig, I think you should be honest about that. The bill was passed unanimously by the state Legislature.
Crosstalk: Jim Patterson voted for it. All right. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Yeah, hold on.
Gustavo Arellano: More after the break.
Gustavo Arellano: So Lila, the activist pushing for the name change in Squaw Valley, Roman Rain Tree, what's his story?
Lila Seidman: Rain Tree was born and raised in Fresno, and as I mentioned, Fresno is about 30 minutes from the small community of Squaw Valley. His grandparents lived there and as a child, he visited them and he told me, his mother, when she was pregnant with him, ate sour berries from the valley and acorns. So she told him, this valley is in your DNA even though you weren't born right here. So he feels very close to that land.
Lila Seidman: Roman is a member of the Dunlap Band of Mono Indians. And his mother, when she was dying from cancer in 2013, they had a conversation and he asked her, Mom, do you think that our tribe will ever get federal recognition while this slur against Indigenous women is on our ancestral homeland?
Roman C. Rain Tree: That is to say, will they even see us as a tribal people while they still see us as a pejorative? My mother thought, no, they still see us as the S-word. So if we can get you to no longer see us as a pejorative and see us as a human being, then maybe we're one step closer to you acknowledging us as a tribal people.
Lila Seidman: This was in 2013, so it would take about seven years for him to bring this issue forward. It kind of makes sense because there was a lot of cultural conversation in those intervening years about name changing, and so when he decided to breach this issue with the supervisors, it was very timely.
Gustavo Arellano: So … did Roman's activism end up helping to get this new law passed?
Lila Seidman: Oh, absolutely. State leaders who sponsored this bill, it was co-introduced, and one of them is a man named James C. Ramos, and he told me that, uh, he was inspired by this debate. He is the first, and I believe to this day, is still the only Indigenous, leader in the state Legislature. And he told me growing up on a reservation that he had heard terms like “squaw” and other offensive, uh, words that were used against the Indigenous community. And his opinion was, you know, it's 2022. There's broad agreement that this term is offensive. It's now been stated from the highest order in federal land. And that inspired him to bring this forward and remove it from California.
Gustavo Arellano: How many places are we talking about and how is it actually going to work? Like actually renaming the places?
Lila Seidman: Yeah, so this bill was just signed and by January 2025, this word will need to be removed from California place names. It's about a hundred. It will give local leaders about six months to come up with a new name, and ideally that would involve input from the community and also local Indigenous voices.
Gustavo Arellano: So how does Fresno Supervisor Nathan Magsig then feel about this bill? Now that it's law, is he working with Roman and others to try to come up with a new name for Squaw Valley?
Lila Seidman: He's actually said that if there is desire in the community to fight it. He is going to fight it. So he hasn't sat down and said, I accept this. Let's, let's work together and come up with a new name. I think he's still trying to figure out if he has enough support to push back. And he sent 1,400 mailers out to local households to ask if they want a name change. And he told my colleague that the local community was left out of the process.
Nathan Magsig: So right now I'm in the process of trying to really do what the state and federal government should have done to begin with, which is meet with the local communities that are gonna be impacted the most by this. And I'm gonna take what residents share with me back to the governor's office as well as to Deb Haaland's office too.
Gustavo Arellano: Yeah, actually, one of our producers reached out to Supervisor Magsig's office to see if they had the results from those mailers yet. And a spokesman said that 87% of Squaw Valley residents that responded didn’t want the name changed. The name change has to happen, it’s now state law — but the people who live there don’t want it changed.
So with that in mind … how does Roman feel about all of this?
Lila Seidman: Well, of course he supports the name change. And reiterated his feelings that this is an offensive term and right now the law is on his side.
Roman C. Rain Tree: The goal was to rename it. It's no longer that word. And so we see that as a victory in and of itself, and we celebrate it with the governor's signature because that was the whole goal all along. Rename it. Anything is better than a C-word. You have to agree with that.
Gustavo Arellano: More after the break.
Gustavo Arellano: Lila, like I mentioned earlier, what's happening in California with the name changes is already federal law on federal land. And you've also seen this movement in sports for decades. Just this year, the Cleveland Indians changed their name to the Guardians, but Stanford sports teams dropped its Indian nickname all the way back in 1972. So why do you think you're seeing such a mass movement right now to ban these offensive names?
Lila Seidman: I think that there has been a reignited conversation around place names. We saw this in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. Of course, as you mentioned, this really isn't anything new per se. Um, there was conversation around the name change of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. Obama changed the name from McKinley and this became a talking point where I believe Trump said that he was going to change it back. So we've seen this conversation before, but I think that, there was increased attention to racial reckoning and sensitivity to Indigenous and other cultures in the last few years. And for many people they don't see this as just a word and hurt feeling, I spoke to several different Indigenous women who told me that this perpetuates violence. In fact, I spoke to Teddy Simon, a racial and economic justice advocate for the ACLU who told me this perpetuates and allows for violence today. Simon and others pointed out that California has alarmingly high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women. And we see that trend actually across the country and elsewhere, including Canada.
Tedde Simon: If your home evokes an image of you as disposable, or the object of someone's lust, or as an identity that is to be erased. How people see themselves and how other people see them really matters. And so when we devalue people, impose these stereotypes, talk about entire peoples in the past tense, all of that really matters.
Lila Seidman: This isn't just something that is in history books. It's still being used to demean women today. And people say to potentially justify violence.
Rain Tree has said that for him, this is not just something for himself. This is a fight he has taken on to help Native women feel safe and cared for. He has a daughter, Lola, and there's a great photo of her holding a sign that says, “I'm not a ‘squaw,’” in front of the Squaw Valley welcome sign. So … he sees this as a fight for his family and future generations.
Roman C. Rain Tree: We're just trying to enhance what's already here. And we propose Yokutch Valley. “Yokutch” means the people. That's what it should be. It's the People's Valley.
I think this is a step forward because if you don't see us as a pejorative you're more inclined to treat us with the respect that we deserve as a human being. And I, I really think that's the impact that my daughter's gonna see growing up.
Gustavo Arellano: Lila, thank you so much for this conversation.
Lila Seidman: Thanks so much for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” Kinsee Morlan and Ashlea Brown were the jefas on this episode, and Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto. Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eappen. And hey, we're building an altar this year, and we need your help. Call (619) 800-0717. (619) 800-0717, and leave us a voicemail with your own. Tell us who you are, where you live, and then give us an anecdote about your lost loved one.
Think of it as a communal digital altar. We will air your stories at an episode closer to the Day of the Dead. I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Wednesday with all the news and desmadre.