The statues are falling. The old guard is rapidly fading. And the names, they are a-changin’.

As centuries of embedded discrimination erupt in sea-to-plain calls for change, an atlas of geographic locations has appeared in the crosshairs. In Colorado, a host of peaks, valleys, creeks and mesas are poised for renaming as Gov. Jared Polis revives an idled panel tasked with studying renaming requests. 

And those pleas are increasingly urgent as BIPOC Americans — Black, Indigenous and people of color — find their voices finally resonating in a rapidly shifting culture.

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Highest on the list — literally — is a call to change the name of Mount Evans, named for Colorado’s second territorial governor who resigned in the aftermath of a cavalry-led massacre of nearly 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne tribal members at Sand Creek in 1864.

Squaw Mountain and Squaw Pass, both in Clear Creek County, are high on the list, too, as are features in Delta County named by Mexican settlers who labeled a mesa and a creek with the Spanish word for the color black, or “negro.”

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“There was no ill intent involved, but as time moves on and languages change and adapt, this is the world we live in and I don’t think anyone out here disagreed that it needed to change,” said Delta County Commissioner Don Suppes, whose board used a contest among local high schoolers to choose Clay Creek and Clay Mesa as the new names for the features labeled on U.S. Geological Survey maps.

The USGS’s Board of Geographic Names has about a dozen proposed name changes for Colorado on its most recent action list. The list includes changing Clear Creek County’s Mount Evans to Mount Cheyenne Arapaho and Squaw Mountain to Mount Mistanta, in tribute to the Southern Cheyenne translator also known as Owl Woman, who was a liaison between her tribe and the settlers around Bent’s Fort in La Junta, which was owned by her husband, William Bent. 

The federally proposed name changes include changing Chaffee County’s Chinaman Gulch to Trout Creek Gulch. Jefferson County’s Redskin Creek would become Ute Creek and Redskin Mountain would become Mount Jerome, after Irene Jerome Hood, an influential Victorian-era artist and photographer from nearby Buffalo Creek. Jefferson County’s Cimarron Peak also is suggested for a name change, with a note that “cimarrón” is a Spanish word for untamed and, dating back to the 1500s, it was used in the Caribbean to describe fugitive slaves.

To read the rest of the Colorado Sun article, click here.