A new year brings plenty of new laws. It also likely brings a new name for a Lake County creek which currently is stuck with a derogatory moniker.
Squaw Creek, out by Ingleside in Grant Township, was one of the places with the offensive sobriquet of “squaw” that the U.S. Department of Interior has ordered to be changed. The county stream flows north 17 miles from its headwaters just south of Ray Lake Forest Preserve, near Wauconda, through Long Lake and then into Fox Lake.
Sometimes we’re a people slow to square the ideals that were voiced when the U.S. was founded. Eventually, we get it right even though there are plenty of roadblocks down the path to equity.
Squaw Creek was on the purge list announced late last year by U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Puebla tribe, is the first Native American to helm the Interior Department. The federal government had been studying dropping “squaw” from the federal registers for a while, but now it is done.
There are some 650 places across the nation with the offensive term which needed to be cleansed, according to the Interior Department. Ranging from canyons to gulches to passes to hills and creeks, most of the usage of “squaw” is out West.
Yet, there are four in Illinois. “Squaw” historically has been used as a slur for Native American women.
“Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands,” Haaland said in a statement. “Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression.”
As some may remember, I have long been an advocate of changing Squaw Creek to a more welcoming, to say the least, name. Last spring, the Squaw Creek Drainage District decided to drop the term and offer the new name of Manitou Creek to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
Haaland’s action should make the renaming — who knew one needed federal permission to change a racist label? — a much easier process since the Interior Department’s Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force is on target to remove the term from federal usage, just as it has done for sites named with slurs for other ethnic groups.
Besides Squaw Creek in Lake County, other Illinois appellations are Laughing Squaw Sloughs near Palos Park in south suburban Cook County; Squaw Island in far Downstate Calhoun County, which is along the Mississippi River; and Squaw Grove Township in southeast DeKalb County.
Wisconsin has 28 uses of the name, including Squaw Island off the Door Peninsula. It looks like it will take a lot of refashioning by our neighbors to the north, which count a number of Native American tribes among residents of America’s Dairyland.
Squaw Creek Drainage District officials opted for Manitou Creek because “manitou” is a supernatural force that, according to a concept by the Algonquin Tribe, pervades the natural world. My aging Merriam-Webster dictionary also says manitou is considered a good or evil spirit as an object of reverence.
Lake County once was home to sizable numbers of Native Americans and, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, 7,112 Indigenous people live here. That is a 116% increase since the 2010 Census.
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Back in March, right before the three-person drainage district — one Lake County’s largest — moved to replace the term, Patrick Duby of Round Lake, chairman of the agency’s board of directors, told me the name change “should have been done a long time ago.” “Manitou” is a way to honor the native “spirit” of the waterway, he noted.
In that vein, it might be time for officials in Indian Creek, the paper village named for another county rivulet which flows through Vernon Township and into the Des Plaines River, to investigate changing its name.
Lake County and Grant Township officials, too, should purge the name of Squaw Road in the Long Lake area from the highway roster. If the federal government can eliminate derogatory names, so should local governments.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
Twitter: @sellenews