By Eric Zimmer
The Repatriation Files is about preserving and returning things lost and stolen to indigenous peoples. Once reserved for artifacts and remains, the concept of repatriation now centers on languages, texts, and art forms. But it should also include place names. Over the last year or so, I’ve gone from casual observer to active supporter of one such effort: the drive to rename Harney Peak, the tallest mountain in South Dakota, to its Lakota name, “Hinhan Kaga” (“the Making of Owls”). But repatriating place, I’ve learned, is more easily said than done.
Hinhan Kaga rests on treaty-protected land, and it was a Lakota elder who first recommended changing its name. As I became more interested and involved in this movement, I authored a report for CAIRNS (which you can read here) about the history of Harney Peak.
My research offered a clear, four-point case for renaming the mountain. In short, General William Selby Harney, for whom the peak was named, never set foot on it. And he was a notoriously violent man who killed a slave child then used his prominence to get away with murder. Harney was an infamous Indian fighter and in 1855, ordered an attack that left eighty-six Lakota men, women, and children—the same people whose land now bears his name—dead. Finally, I argued, reclaiming Hinhan Kaga comports with Lakota naming conventions and the growing global momentum behind renaming indigenous places. President Obama, in the most recent and high-profile example, announced the return of North America’s tallest mountain, Mt. McKinley, to its Athabaskan name, “Denali,” in August 2015.
Yet the fate of Hinhan Kaga remains unknown. The South Dakota Board of Geographic Names officially suggested reinscribing it as Hinhan Kaga this spring. But that body reversed its decision a month later following a visceral, angry backlash by some South Dakotans. At best, they claimed, the effort to rename Harney Peak is an overreach by the liberal “PC police.” At worst, it is part of the slow and deliberate erasure of a valorous regional heritage.
Black Elk praying at Hinhan Kaga.
The issue is presently on the docket of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, which bears the ultimate authority on the renaming of prominent landmarks.
But that body is reportedly considering changing the mountain’s name to “Black Elk Peak,” not Hinhan Kaga. Given Harney’s controversial legacy, even that change would be a marked improvement.
But one thing should be clear: repatriating Hinhan Kaga (or giving the place another name) is not about political correctness or attempting to change the past. It is an effort to reclaim the ground—both literal and figurative—upon which conversations about the collective history of indigenous places occur. For too long, the legacies of Native dispossession and its consequences have been masked by the written, spoken, and physical monuments of conquest. Repatriating place names is a simple, straightforward beacon of our society’s collective willingness to do better.
In pondering the role of place in the project of repatriation, we must consider the past as an ongoing conversation, as well as a space from which to draw lessons that can shape our future. With that in mind, we might see that history has the power to move mountains. Or at least, hopefully, to rename them.
Hinhan Kaga today.