Yellowstone National Park officially announced the renaming of Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain.
The change was announced in a June 9 National Park Service news release, following a 15-0 vote by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the federal entity responsible for keeping geographic name usage uniform.
"We heard our Blackfeet sisters' screams as they ran to the river on that cold January morning in 1870," Blackfeet Tribal member Tom Rodgers, who also is a Rocky Mountain Tribal Council adviser, said in a June 13 CNN news story. "We heard their cry for justice. We sought justice. We sought an accounting. We sought a reckoning with history. It has taken far far too long for this journey of healing to arrive. Finally hope and history rhyme."
Piikani Nation Chief Stan Grier in a 2017 photo
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First Peoples Mountain, a 10,551-foot peak in south Yellowstone, had been named for Gustavus Doane, an important member of the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition of 1870, according to the NPS release. Doane, apparently in response to a white fur trader's alleged murder, led an attack on a band of Piegan Blackfeet in what became known as the Marias Massacre, in which at least 173 native peoples, including many women, elderly tribal members and children suffering from smallpox, were killed.
“This name change is long overdue," Piikani Nation Chief Stan Grier said in a June 13 NBC news story. "We all agreed on First Peoples Mountain as an appropriate name to honor the victims of such inhumane acts of genocide and to also remind people of the 10,000-year-plus connection Tribal peoples have to this sacred place now called Yellowstone."
"Doane wrote fondly about this attack and bragged about it for the rest of his life," the NPS said in its news release.
All 27 associated Tribes were consulted for several months before the vote and none voiced opposition to the name change or any other concerns, according to the NPS news release.
