Earth Matters: Haaland to ditch racist place names; ZETA pushing Biden on 100% EV sales by 2030
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Earth Matters is a weekly compendium of wonderful, disturbing, and hideous news briefs about the environment. Rep. Deb Haaland, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Department of the Interior. AS INTERIOR secretary, HAALAND COULD CHEarth Matters: Haaland to ditch racist place names; ZETA pushing Biden on 100% EV sales by 2030
Earth Matters is a weekly compendium of wonderful, disturbing, and hideous news briefs about the environment. Rep. Deb Haaland, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Department of the Interior. AS INTERIOR secretary, HAALAND COULD CHANGE RACIST NAMES ON FEDERAL LANDS If Rep. Debra Haaland, the Laguna Pueblo woman who has been nominated as the next secretary of the interior, is confirmed by the Senate, she will be in a position to replace racist names of rivers, lakes, and mountains. Renaming has been underway for decades, but that very fact shows how slow the process is. The 131-year-old Board on Geographic Names (BGN) doesn’t come up with names itself but picks from those proposed by others on a case by case basis. For instance, in fiscal year 2019, the BGN scrutinized 165 proposed replacement names, approving 138 and rejecting 27—a typical year. One name change made at the request of the Georgia Senate: Runaway Negro Creek in Chatham County, which was renamed Freedom Creek. In 2016, BGN approved renaming Harney Peak, South Dakota’s highest mountain, to Black Elk Peak. This pleased the state’s Native population as Black Elk was a highly respected spiritual leader of the Oglala Lakota. But it irked Sen. John Thune and then-Gov. Dennis Daugaard, with Thune calling it a “unilateral decision” done without consulting South Dakota leaders. Army Gen. William S. Harney was known for his ruthlessness in engagements with the Indian resistance from Florida to the Dakotas. In 1855, under his command, soldiers killed about half of the 250 Lakota they had cornered in a cave, including many women and children, resulting in the Grattan Massacre. Last year, Haaland introduced the Reconciliation in Place Names Act that would establish a 16-member advisory board with the purpose of renaming places with offensive names. The bill collected 15 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats. Michael Doyle at GreenWire notes that at Interior Haaland might follow in the footsteps of Stewart Udall, secretary of interior under JFK. He ordered that a racist slur against Black people used in many place names «shall not be used on any new Federal maps or publications as part of a geographic name.» Changes began right away, but it took a decade before “Jap” was replaced by “Japanese” or “Nisei” in place names. In 2015, a survey found 1,441 federally recognized places with questionable names. Read more