Which is exactly what you’d expect them to say.

DENVER — Unusual campus names are a venerable college tradition — think Harvard’s Wigglesworth Hall or Southern California’s Argue Plaza — but nothing quite compares to those under review at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Boulder Campus Planning Commission has recommended renaming two renovated dormitories “Houusoo Hall” and “Nowoo3 Hall” after two Arapaho Indian chiefs better known in the history books as Chief Hosa and Chief Niwot.

The Nov. 14 decision came after faculty members argued that using the phonetic or literal translations would be culturally insensitive. The names “Houusoo” and “Nowoo3” are the spellings from the Arapaho/Hinono’ei language.

“While the orthographies might initially seem foreign or hard to understand to non-Arapahos and non-Natives, choosing to spell Nowoo3 as Niwot would be equivalent to spelling Charles de Gaulle’s name phonetically [Sharl duh Gahl], which is culturally chauvinist and clearly primitivizing in a Native American context,” says a Nov. 13 letter signed by 23 members of the CU Native Studies faculty.

HT: Andrew Johnson