High above the Sierra valley where I spent my childhood, three pines had fallen at angles to one another. Their uplifted limbs created a triangular space that my brother and I claimed as our tipi—as we claimed many ideas inspired by the Indigenous people who first inhabited what we thought of as “our” valley. My hair in braids, using a branch to stir a hollow in a tree trunk, I waved goodbye to my brother and his friends as they strode away with their stick-and-string bows to track imaginary bison. I stayed behind, stirring invisible stew. There were no cowboys in our game, and it soon grew old. It was not life-and-death for me, as it would have been for the women I emulated. I headed down the mountain to read a book.
While this demonstrates normalized gender roles of the late 1950s, it also underscores how as children we interpreted the supposed history of our home.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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This was before the 1960 Winter Olympics altered the footprint of the valley, when the wide meadow ran its entire length, graced by a looping creek. Half that meadow is now paved with a “village” teeming with retail options, condos, and massive amounts of parking. But the creek, fed by snowmelt, still tumbles down mountains that heave into the sky at one end of the valley, descending through lowering slopes to the valley’s mouth, where it joins the Truckee River. It’s easy to imagine why Indigenous peoples passed summers here. The men headed into the mountains to seek game; the women and children stayed in the meadow. This was the charming reason, we understood, for its name: Squaw Valley.
It took a long time to understand that it was the opposite of charming.
We lived on Apache Court. One friend lived on Navaho Court, another on Paiute Place, cul-de-sacs named for tribes who lived hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, chosen, perhaps, for their familiarity and notoriety—due to their ferocious opposition to the white people’s incursions. There are no roads named for tribes who at the time lived within 150 miles: the Miwok, the Yokuts, the Nisenan.
But there is Washoe Drive, named for those who for thousands of years moved between what is now known as the Great Basin in Nevada and the territory around Lake Tahoe, known to the Washoe as Da ow ga and sacred to them. Early in the 1800s, trappers arrived, followed by hundreds of thousands rushing for gold. By 1862, Washoe lands belonged to the white people.
In the 1930s, Wayne Poulsen, an avid skier, trekked around the valley envisioning a ski resort; he was run off by a family ranching in the meadow. But by the late 1940s, he’d secured the backing of Wall Street lawyer Alex Cushing, who then turned the tables on Poulsen: he granted himself the mountains to build a resort, giving Poulsen the meadow acres. While Poulsen eventually made a fortune in real estate, Cushing landed—surprising everyone—the 1960 Winter Olympics.
The Olympics changed much about the valley, bringing not only the construction of ice rinks and ski lifts and parking lots but also a population expansion—and a name change. As there was already an incorporated Squaw Valley in Fresno County, our post office designation became Olympic Valley. But except to write letters home, no one ever used it. We all loved the lore surrounding our valley. As did the resort: One of its early logos is a woman skiing in a red buffalo robe. Knees bent, she holds her poles for balance; a long braid flies behind her. Riding on her skis is a child, also female, staring out at us, her cheek pressed to her mother’s back.
For us, the image conveyed affection and respect; it embodied everything kind and athletic and familial about Indigenous women. Rapt at our fourth-grade desks, learning our state’s history, we were never taught that the word attached to the valley in fact debased and demeaned them.
But in the 1990s came murmurs, then mutters, then demands that the word be removed from the many places that used it, all across America, including our valley and its resort. Like many at the time, I was dismissive—even as the argument was taking place literally at home: My father, writer Oakley Hall, had built our house on Apache Court in the mid-’50s. By the late ’60s, my parents and some friends had organized a western writers’ conference. Naturally, its name included that of the valley in which it took place. For almost 50 years, those participating in the Community of Writers referred to it by that single word. But for the past two decades, my sister, Brett Hall Jones, the conference’s executive director, has worked to excise the term from the Community’s name—even as I retained a colonial certainty that this “movement” would simply fade away. One day, Brett shared a message from a prospective participant who is Indigenous, who asked us to imagine what it might be like to apply to, much less attend, a conference whose name included one of her people’s most lurid and obscene terms.
The full force of the word came over me like hot shame.
The word, which descends phonetically from Algonquian languages, conveys “woman” or “female,” as in female friend or Indian woman; it is in that context that early English settlers used it. In the Mohawk language—which is not Algonquian but Iroquoian—the word is believed to refer to a woman’s most private part. Although this is disputed, one can imagine how it could become a synecdoche.
Yet even if the original use was not denigrative, it became so; examples run the gamut from historical news articles to a James Fenimore Cooper novel to the memoirs of a U.S. Army lieutenant, conveying ugliness, barbarism, sloth, disease—and prostitution. I found alternative histories regarding the origin of our valley’s name, including gruesome tales of scalping, rape, and murder. I began to understand that like other slurs no longer in common use, the word is meant to dehumanize, objectify, debase—in this case, not only women but an entire culture.
Even as there was a growing movement across the country to find new designations for the many geographic features that used the word, including creeks, buttes, lakes, and peaks, the company behind the valley’s ski resort succeeded in trademarking its by then world-famous name. In 2020, however, it decided to rebrand. Whether this was an effort to get out ahead of the inevitable or a form of linguistic propriety, it launched what became an exhaustive process. As the company requested input from a wide variety of sources and communities, including the Washoe, it was assailed by accusations of liberal “wokeness.” But the list of states that, starting decades ago, have instituted such changes—including Minnesota, Montana, Maine, Oklahoma, and Texas—undercuts this criticism. In 2022, under Secretary Deb Haaland, the Interior Department banned the term’s use to name public lands.
The ski resort is now Palisades Tahoe. This honors the Washoe, and their sacred lake, yet it’s clever, too, since the name Tahoe, like the word it replaces, enjoys worldwide recognition. While the most common meaning of palisade—a fence—makes little sense in this context and is even ironic, considering how the Washoe were fenced out of their own land, the word’s geographic meaning, a line of steep cliffs, is apt: the area is famous for high-risk skiing. Admirably, any search for the resort’s previous name turns up links to the new one, offering thorough explanations for the change.
Local signage increasingly reads “Olympic Valley.” Some of us still stumble over it, but it’s telling that I now wince when I read or hear what it was called for so many years. In any case, the qualities that define our valley lie not in what it’s called. Those splendid peaks, that wide meadow, the shimmering creek remain.•
