On September 16th of this year, I found myself at the summit of what was then Clingmans Dome. Just two days later, the mountain’s original name—the one the Cherokee people have used since time immemorial—was reinstated: Kuwohi. There’s a distinct feeling of justice in witnessing this official change. Yet, I believe the movement to rename buildings, natural features, and institutions associated with controversial figures should go further. While much of the renaming effort has focused on oppressors from African-American history, Native peoples deserve a seat at the table in this discussion. Most articles justifying Kuwohi’s renaming cite Clingman’s time in the Confederate army as a reason for the change. While Confederate generals and segregationists more than deserve to have these honors removed, so too do the generals of the Indian Wars, Indian removalists, and other perpetrators of anti-Native policies. Unfortunately, there is far less mainstream awareness of these anti-Native figures and less public pressure to remove the names associated with them. This must change.

Why Do Names Matter?

Names are not neutral. When we choose to name something after a historical figure, we are choosing to honor them – and their actions. This shows what we value as a nation, shaping our collective memory and our identity. The names we choose for these honors are supposed to indicate our greatest heroes. As societal values evolve, it becomes essential to reevaluate who we choose to honor and why. Do you want to honor the norms and ideas of 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, even when they are abhorrent to us now?

Why Are These Names Being Changed?

In the wake of 2020, a wave of political activism emerged, challenging the way our nation remembers its past. A key issue in this movement has been the renaming of institutions and places that commemorate individuals associated with slavery, genocide, and colonialism.

Many of these institutions honored people like Stonewall Jackson, a prominent Confederate general, despite his lack of personal connection to the communities naming the buildings. For example, in Jacksonville, Florida, several schools were renamed: Joseph Finegan Elementary, Stonewall Jackson Elementary, Jefferson Davis Middle School, Kirby-Smith Middle School, J.E.B. Stuart Middle School, and Robert E. Lee High School. Only two of these individuals were from Florida, let alone the Jacksonville area. These men, all Confederate officers, were not chosen at random; their names were part of a deliberate effort to glorify the Confederacy and its ideals.

Critics of renaming argue that changing these names is meant to erase history or push modern morality onto a different past. This misunderstands the purpose of renaming itself. Renaming isn’t erasing history – it’s about telling it fully. These schools’ name choices weren’t neutral, nor are those elsewhere, they’re intentional symbols of what we choose to celebrate. Acknowledging the wrongs these figures perpetuated isn’t erasing their history, but it is ensuring all voices are heard, not just those in power.

The renaming movement has largely aimed to challenge the names celebrating the mythos of Antebellum America, the legacy of the “Lost Cause”, and the ideals of the Jim Crow South, reminding people that ‘the good ole days’ were not good for everyone. This raises the question: Who are we honoring with these names, and do they truly deserve celebration? To that end, most name changes have addressed Confederate military service, ties to slavery, and associations with segregation. Unfortunately, relatively few renamings have considered figures known for actions against Native people.

What is life like for Native Americans in the wake of Renaming?

The renaming of the Washington Redskins to the Commanders and the Cleveland Indians to the Guardians was a welcome change, but it came after more than 50 years of protests by Native activists. Meanwhile, teams like the Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Braves, and Chicago Blackhawks continue to use controversial Native mascots.

As a sports fan I can turn on the TV and see fans doing the tomahawk chop, wearing headdresses, and donning “warpaint” on any given night. I can see teams like the Florida State Seminoles and Utah Utes, ironically using Native mascots as public universities representing states with horrible, anti-Native track records. In fact, Osceola, Florida State’s “symbol” was an actual Native leader who died as a prisoner of war to the U.S. Army. Florida State chooses to honor the celebrated Seminole statesman and orator by allowing a non-Native student to don redface, put on a Native costume, and stab a flaming spear into their homefield, all in the guise of “Osceola.” These actions are unthinkable in any other racial context. Could you imagine the uproar if Florida State used a prominent African-American leader and orator from the same era, like Frederick Douglass, as their “symbol?”

We have much work to do as a society. There is obvious and open anti-Native racism displayed on national TV on any given day. This highlights the need to have Native people at the table in this activism. If open disrespect is commonplace, how can we expect the American people to recognize and confront the more subtle problem of renaming?

The Disrespect Just Below the Surface

Beyond these more obvious affronts, there are major schools named after famed anti-Natives. Brigham Young University (BYU) and Baylor University are just two examples. BYU is of course named after Brigham Young the famed Mormon leader who possessed a Native slave in his household, encouraged Mormon enslavement of Natives, and ordered the extermination of the Timpanogos, saying, “We have no peace until the men [are] killed off—never treat the Indian as your equal.”¹

Baylor is principally named after R.E.B. Baylor, a prominent judge during Texas’ Republic era and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Second Creek War, the final action that cemented Muskogee land loss in Alabama.² Baylor University also acknowledges John R. Baylor, R.E.B.’s nephew, as an early contributor to the college. John R. Baylor, whom Baylor memorializes as an “Indian fighter” and man who led an adventurous life,³ was the editor of the white supremacist newspaper The White Man and organized lynch mobs against the Brazos Reservation in North Texas. This lasted until the residents were forced to flee for their lives across the Red River.⁴

The irony is not lost on me that the very man whose violence prompted my Wichita and Caddo ancestors to flee to safety in the dead of night is memorialized by a university built overtop an ancestral Waco village – the place my ancestors lived a mere decade before the Brazos reservation.

Later on, John R. Baylor was further distinguished as Governor of the Confederate Arizona Territory, where he issued orders to exterminate the Apaches living within the territory:

[U]se all means to persuade the Apaches or any tribe to come in for the purpose of making peace, and when you get them together kill all the grown Indians and take the children prisoners and sell them to defray the expense of killing the adult Indians.⁵

This action was so abhorrent to Jefferson Davis, the slaveholding President of the Confederacy, that he removed Baylor as governor and revoked his commission in the Confederate Army.⁶

How is there not more pressure upon these institutions? Could you imagine how a hypothetical “Robert E. Lee University” or “John Calhoun Tech” might be received in today’s political climate? Sadly, these examples from higher education are just the tip of the iceberg.

States, Counties, and Cities: Memorializing Anti-Native Legacies

Even beyond sports teams and universities, these honors for anti-Native figures are ubiquitous in everyday life. For God’s sake, we live in a country that has states named after George Washington and Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr.

Baron De La Warr was the architect of genocidal policies in colonial Jamestown. In a raid upon the Paspahegh people of Virginia, which destroyed their capital, Jamestown colonists indiscriminately killed women and children. The wife and children of the Paspahegh leader Wowinchopunck were captured, with the militia company deciding to kill them as well.⁷ All under the orders of the Baron De La Warr.

Another prominent Virginian, George Washington, the beloved founding father of our nation, is not as beloved by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). He is also known as Hanödaga꞉nyas (Town Destroyer) due to his ordering of Sullivan’s Expedition in the American Revolutionary War, a campaign that resulted in dozens of villages being burned and thousands of Haudenosaunee people becoming refugees. Cornplanter, a Seneca leader, once told Washington, “When your army entered the Country of the Six Nations, we called you the Town-destroyer and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”⁸

Washington also praised Colonel Goose Van Schaick’s expedition against the Onondaga, telling him that it had brought “the highest honor” to Van Schaick and his company. An Onondaga Chief described that campaign as follows: “[They] put to death all the Women and Children, excepting some of the Young Women, whom they carried away for the use of their Soldiers & were afterwards put to death in a more shameful manner.”⁹

Reckoning with this past is not easy, but it is essential. How can we, as a nation, begin to address a history so deeply intertwined with violence against Native people and land dispossession? A history that is often honored in the placenames we choose.

The Scope of the Problem

In the United States there are 6 counties, 9 municipalities, and national forests, cemeteries, and military institutions named after George Armstrong Custer. Riding in to the tune of Garryowen, Custer’s 7th Cavalry massacred Black Kettle’s peaceful Cheyenne Band on the Washita River. According to Ben Clark, one of Custer’s scouts,” [T]he regiment galloped through the tepees … firing indiscriminately and killing men and women alike.”¹⁰ Custer’s regiment also captured numerous women and children to exploit as leverage against the Cheyenne and to use as human shields while retreating from the village. It is a terrible irony that one of those counties, Custer County, Oklahoma, is a mere 20 miles from the site of this atrocity. Custer and his 7th Cavalry were also well-known for their depredations against Native women. About this, historian Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “There was a saying among the soldiers of the western frontier, a saying Custer and his officers could heartily endorse: ‘Indian women rape easy.’”¹¹

In the United States, there are 22 counties, 21 municipalities, and numerous schools, parks, and military institutions named after Andrew Jackson – the chief architect of Indian Removal. Long before he sent the Seminoles, Cherokees, Muskogees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws on the Trail of Tears—where thousands perished—Jackson fought many brutal battles against Native peoples. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, possibly his most famous victory after the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson’s troops killed nearly 800 Red Stick Creek warriors and subsequently skinned their bodies to make leather goods, like bridles for their horses.¹² Jackson himself was known to keep the scalps of Natives he had killed.

Some defenders of Jackson point to his fostering of three Muskogee children as evidence that he was not the bloodthirsty Indian killer his critics claim. Yet, these children’s circumstances tell a different story. Lyncoya, the most famous of the three, was only brought to Jackson’s home to replace another Muskogee child, Theodore, who had served as Andrew Jackson Jr.’s “playmate” until his death. In a letter, Jackson wrote, “I expect [Andrew Jr.] lamented his loss—to amuse him, and to make him forget his loss, I have asked Col Hays to carry Lyncoya to him.”¹³ Jackson referred to the third Muskogee child, Charley, as “another pett” he intended to gift to one of his sons. Tragically, these children were often orphaned as a direct result of Jackson’s military campaigns. Lyncoya’s parents were killed during the Battle of Tallushatchee, where Jackson’s forces “razed the town’s cabins, burning alive those who had sought refuge inside.”¹⁴ Men, women, and children were slaughtered indiscriminately, with even hardened frontiersmen recounting being “revolt[ed]” and “heartsick” at the soldiers’ actions.¹⁵ Davy Crockett, who participated in the battle, described it bluntly: “We shot ’em down like dogs.” He went on to describe burning down a house where 46 Muskogee warriors were hiding with their families.¹⁶

In the United States, there are dozens of statues and parks, at least 54 municipalities, a federal holiday, and a prestigious university named after Christopher Columbus. His history of Native enslavement, mutilation, and other atrocities against the Taino and Arawak was considered so brutal by the Spanish monarchy — the same monarchy infamous for its brutality during the Spanish Inquisition—that he was stripped of his governorship on Hispaniola and returned to Spain in shackles.¹⁷

The average person might know that Columbus and Andrew Jackson are controversial, some may even know about Custer. But how many people know about the genocidal histories of Philip Sheridan, Kit Carson, or John C. Fremont?

Despite their legacies of violence, these names continue to adorn public institutions and spaces across our country. Unfortunately, these are not isolated examples, but they reveal a systemic pattern of glorifying individuals that contradict the values we claim to stand for today. How can we justify honoring these men whose policies and actions caused such immense suffering?

What Do We Do When Groups View these Figures in Different Lights?

History is complicated, and people often have complicated, contradictory legacies. Abraham Lincoln is celebrated as the Great Emancipator in African-American history, yet he also presided over the largest mass execution in American history: the hanging of 38 Native prisoners of war during the Dakota War of 1862.¹⁸

Similarly, William T. Sherman is seen as a hero of the Union, credited with his promise of “40 acres and a mule” in his Special Field Orders, No. 15, which called for the resettlement of thousands of freed slaves on land seized from white slaveholders.¹⁹ But Sherman also led brutal campaigns against Native Americans, at one point telling Ulysses S. Grant, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”²⁰ His opposition to Native existence went so far as promoting the extermination of the buffalo to starve Plains tribes into submission, a view that influenced President Grant’s veto of a bill protecting these animals from overhunting.²¹

Even cultural icons, like Mark Twain and L. Frank Baum, display similar contradictions. While both writers supported progressive causes like abolition and women’s suffrage, they also espoused vehement hatred toward Native Americans, with both Twain and Baum going so far as to advocate for the total extermination of all Native people.

Reckoning with complex legacies requires a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. Without Native perspectives, we risk continuing a one-sided narrative that prioritizes convenience over accountability. We risk honoring those who may not deserve it.

Why We Need Native Inclusion in the Mainstream Renaming Movement

Out of the numerous examples of historical figures who were anti-Native, how many were you familiar with? Our nation seems to constantly be at war with our own history, a cognitive dissonance that is only cured by the historical amnesia the American people constantly exhibit. ‘If we don’t think about it, it didn’t happen’ has been the way Native histories are ignored for far too long. How can we confront problems that we are so reluctant to acknowledge? This is why we need a seat at the table. Amidst calls for solidarity, and Native inclusion in activist language, Native issues are still not achieving the awareness they should. This must change.

If Robert E. Lee’s name deserves replacement, is Custer’s not deserving? How about Mark Twain’s? For far too long, the Philip Sheridans, Kit Carsons, and John C. Fremonts of the world have been allowed to skate by with genocidal legacies. Between these three men there are 10 U.S. counties, 24 municipalities, and dozens of statues, natural features, and parks honoring them. How can a nation that claims to value freedom and equality continue to overlook the harm these names represent?

Expanding the renaming movement to include Native voices is not just about righting historical wrongs; it’s about acknowledging the full spectrum of American history, even when its painful. Just as renaming has been used to challenge the rhetoric of “the Lost Cause” and celebration of the Antebellum South, it should also be used to challenge the national myths of Manifest Destiny and the “Won West.” The quest for an accurate telling of our history isn’t over until we all have seats at the table to tell it.

Truly addressing these entrenched legacies requires more than mere acknowledgment, however—it requires action. Name Repatriation can be that action.

What is Name Repatriation?

Name Repatriation is the idea that the original names of places should be restored, especially within the broader renaming movement. Kuwohi is a recent example, while the 2015 restoration of Mount McKinley’s original name, Denali, represents an earlier instance.²² Both changes honor Native names for the mountains, replacing those of controversial historical figures.

For instance, Thomas L. Clingman, the namesake of Clingmans Dome, was a prominent antebellum politician in North Carolina and later served as a Confederate general.²³ William McKinley, the 25th President, may have fought on the Union side during the Civil War, but his administration was marred with imperialism. Not only did he preside over the annexation of Hawaii, but he also betrayed promises of freedom to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.²⁴ Puerto Rico and Guam remain U.S. territories to this day, legacies of this imperialist era.

Name Repatriation is the Missing Puzzle Piece

How fitting would it be to replace Kit Carson National Forest’s name with a Native one? I can scarcely think of a better way to pave over the legacy of the people who so fervently hated Natives than to replace their names with the original, Native placenames. Reclaiming these names is more than symbolic; it represents an active choice to honor and preserve the Indigenous presence these men tried so hard to erase. Name repatriation sends a powerful message: that the stories of Native people matter and deserve a place in our public memory.

The renaming of Kuwohi carried with it a feeling of justice because it so perfectly encapsulated Native resilience and healing. Despite removals, massacres, and targeted violence, we are still here, and so too are our names. Kuwohi offers us a glimpse of what this justice can look like – acknowledgement and an active choice to honor Indigenous legacy. Perhaps this can be the little reminder that jolts the American people out of their historical amnesia and lead to true reconciliation of our shared history.

The Final Verdict

I want to be clear. I am not saying that we need to rename Washington and Delaware, nor am I saying that this world is black and white. George Washington embodied many of our nation’s purest ideals, but he also symbolizes America’s gravest injustices: slavery and Native genocide.

Acknowledgement is the first step to change, and it’s time we begin to fully recognize our complicated past. But once that occurs, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels: we must act. Each day Custer’s name remains on a county, town, or school in the United States is a day we choose to honor his legacy—a choice we must reconsider.

If Germany can remove Nazi-era symbolism and rename the places associated with the Third Reich; if South Africa can address their history of Apartheid by renaming places to honor those who ended the practice; if New Zealand and Australia can honor the Indigenous placenames for many of their most famous natural features, so too can the United States begin to account for our own checkered past.

To continue as a strong and united nation, we first have to reconcile with our uncomfortable history, and then actively choose a new future. A future rooted in equality and humanity, a future that rejects the legacies of Andrew Jackson and Christopher Columbus, and a future where Native peoples have a seat at the table.

Sources List

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