Change all monuments and memorials to numbers to appease the offended.
Two Bozeman historians are supporting tribal groups’ call for the removal of Gustavus Cheyney Doane’s name from a mountain in Yellowstone National Park.
On Saturday, representatives of the Blackfoot Confederacy and Great Sioux Nation will gather at Yellowstone’s iconic Roosevelt Arch at 1 p.m. to protest the geographical references to Doane and Ferdinand Hayden, historical figures tied to the park that they say had racist — and in Doane’s case violent — pasts. The protest will be preceded by a noon ceremonial ride through Gardiner to Arch Park. Afterward tribal leaders will present an official request for the name change to the National Park Service.
Hayden’s name is attached to a valley north of Yellowstone Lake, and a 10,551-foot tall mountain peak east of Yellowstone Lake is named after Doane. Both features are in Wyoming.
“I fully support their protest and their effort to remove Capt. Doane’s name from that peak” if that prevents American Indians from celebrating such a “beautiful place as Yellowstone,” said Kim Allen Scott, a Bozeman historian who wrote a biography on Doane.
Doane was a lieutenant under Maj. Eugene Baker’s command when the U.S. Army killed an estimated 200 members of Mountain Chief’s Piegan Blackfeet tribe in Montana territory on Jan. 23, 1870. The camp was mainly composed of old people, women and children, many of whom were suffering from smallpox. The event is known as the Baker, Piegan or Marias massacre.[…]
Grier plans to attend the event with other tribal members, a protest that is a continuation of similar demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline and tribal support of keeping Yellowstone-area grizzly bears protected under the Endangered Species Act. He also said it was timely coming up on the 147th anniversary of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition to Yellowstone.
The event will honor the memory of those ancestors massacred, Grier said, “who we believe never go away, their spirit lives on. Our ancestors need remembering.”
Park spokeswoman Morgan Warthin said, “We welcome productive discussions with the tribes now and into the future about this issue.”
She also pointed out that changing geographic names is not up to the park; that falls under the control of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which has removed names for features repugnant to native people in the past, such as the word “squaw” that had been attached to numerous lakes, creeks and peaks. Warthin noted Squaw Lake in Yellowstone is now Indian Pond.