The Meaning of a Mountain

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I think in English, uh especially when you have the explorers that first come, they name things after important people or in this instance a best friend uh on another continent. Whereas here with our language, every place name has a significance. These names go back thousands of years and that meaning is so strong that when you say it you can feel that that presence of the name and then the meaning behind it. Don't forget the water. Don't forget the water. Oh my

And and don't forget the water. Take it along with us. Hey there listeners, welcome to Crosscut Escapes. I'm your host, Ted Alvarez. For our very first episode, way back in season one, we told a story about a mountain. Not just any mountain, the mountain. You know the one I'm talking about. The biggest one in the state, the one you can see hulking on the horizon from Seattle, Tacoma, Yakima, sometimes even farther away. You know the name. It's famous.

On beer cans, baseball stadiums, plumbing companies, street signs, beaches. You've noticed I'm not saying that name, because that name, the one you know so well, well that's not what everyone calls it. In fact, it has many names, given to it by the many different peoples who were here before there was a Washington, and who are still here.

For this episode, the final one of this season of Crosscut Escapes, I'm going to take a step back and listen. This time, I'm not listening for birds or a waterfall or the sound of a mountain singing. I'm listening to the people who have the most to say about this mountain, because their history goes back further than anyone else. The first thing to know is that to many of those people, the mountain isn't even really an it. It's a she.

In our creation stories, she is the center of all those stories. So she is the giver of water, she's the giver of life. This is Brandon Raynin, Historic Preservation Officer for the Pewalp tribe of Indians. He and everyone else you'll hear from this episode spoke earlier this year with Beatrice Costalima, a video producer for Crosscut.

We call her she because she gives us life. And this is Hanford McLeod, a member of the Nisqually tribe. So my name is Huwiko Dai Hanford McLeod. I am a sixth council member for the Nisqually Indian Tribe.

And and those are the stories that I recall, especially coming from, you know, my mom and, you know, my aunties and grandma and You know, and and you can hear that'cause the the women would really, really tell you a lot of the stories and when when you say I say stories it's more of a legend because those names represent a place in time that our people had come to. That story, the origin story of the mountain, is one built in pain and lost.

And the survival of the people of the mountains, rivers, and sea around her depended on the gifts that grew out of the traumatic events of her life. It's even woven into many of her names. One of those names, Takotma, translates to don't forget the water, and refers to the legend of her journey from the Olympics to the Cascades. But she came from the Olympics and as she come across this prairie here, as she come across this land, she she dropped her medicine.

And she took her medicine from that Olympics area over there by Macaw, Nea Bay, and Kunal. And she was mad because, you know, her sister Mount St. Helens had an had an affair with her husband Mount Adam. And so she picked up all her medicine and came across Hama Hama and these areas right here and that's how you get the valley right here from the water.

her dragging kind of across the way and and saddened with what had happened and and and dropping these medicines until, you know, you can see that uh I would hear that story from the over there on the west coast of how You know, the medicine is no longer over there, it's all here.

Like any good story, it changes in the telling, and only gets richer as perspectives are added and more details surface. Sometimes the mountain's husband is Mount Adams, sometimes it's Mount Olympus. These shifting characters with deep emotions and backstories, they might seem pretty different from the hard numbers often used to describe the mountain. 14,411 feet tall, 25 major glaciers, but they flesh out the Y of the mountain and the whole of the northwest in ways that Rawfax often can.

Here's another version, this time from Hanford McLeod's mother, Joyce McLeod. She's the culture director for the Nisqually tribe. She was married to Mount Olympus, but Mount Olympus fell in love with another mountain. And she was really sad. She was gonna leave and come over here to the the other mountain. Cascade. So she gathered up everything that she needed to survive in the cascade.

She gathered up all the huckleberries and and all the medicines that you only see in the Cascades. She headed out and she was crying. And as she was crying, she was dragging all her bag baggage that she had with her. Then she stopped. She stopped in the middle of what is now called Puget Sound.

And she turned around and she goes, Takotma. She told her son, Takotma, don't forget the water. So he grabbed the water from the mountains. And then they headed out, headed towards the cascades. And as she went along, she created all the rivers. Nisqually River, Piaup River, all the rivers connected to Pacotma in um

That is why today you cannot go over to the Olympics and find the mountain huckleberries. Because Kultma took them all with her. And that's where they grow. They're only up in by Mount Rainier.

Did you hear that? Mount Rainier. The name you probably know best. The one on all the official maps, the one on the beer cans, the one you hashtag on Instagram after you visit or climb. That's the name with a ton of colonial baggage. This is a conversation that shows up time and again in the Pacific Northwest.

And with good reason. As with so many other places in the US, the names we still use for prominent features of the landscape came from white explorers or settlers who trekked in from somewhere else and declared it theirs. Mount Whitney, for instance, the tallest mountain in California, as well as in the lower forty eight, is named after Josiah Whitney, a Harvard professor who led a US geological survey team through the region in eighteen sixty four.

Colorado's tallest peak, Mount Elbert, was named after the 19th-century governor of what was then a U.S. territory, allegedly to honor a deal he struck with the Ute tribe that would open up millions of acres of land in the region to mining and railroad development. Mount Olympus and Mount Adams, those are also colonial names, chosen by a British explorer and an American settler, respectively.

And the name Rainier? It first showed up here because of George Vancouver, an officer in the British Navy who led an expedition through Coast Salish waters in 1792. Here's Brandon again from the Pew Alop tribe. How we even got the name Rainier is quite interesting. Rainier is an admiral in the British Navy in the 1790s at the same time and around the same time as the American Revolution.

And so you have Vancouver arrive, he sees a he sees the peak, sees this beautiful mountain and names after his best friend. Well that name was kind of lost. That name kind of went away. It wasn't really accepted. And the local settlers called it Mount Tacoma for the longest time. Then you have around the uh late eighteen hundreds, going into the early nineteen hundreds, this rivalry that developed between Seattle and Tacoma.

What I call the crooks of Seattle uh versus the crooks of Tacoma. Uh the crooks of Seattle couldn't stand the fact that you would have this mountain named after their rival city. And so they worked with the US Board of Uh Geographic Names and ended up bribing them with a car a train car full of beer. And persuaded them to adopt the name Rainier, which was originally given by this wonderful explorer, Vancouver. And so that's how we got the name Rainier to begin with.

Well, that part about the beer, that might have been a rumor, it's pretty hard to verify. But regardless, the controversy over the name was real, and it's continued to some degree ever since. Captain Vancouver who came to this area and explored it, uh, named it after his friend, whose last name was Rainier, who never stepped foot on this continent.

Um so I think that is a bother to a lot of people. This is Amber Sterud Hayward, director of the Puallop tribal language program, which focuses on revitalizing one of the first languages of the region, Lashutseed, and its many dialects. Amber Stairwood Hayward Seed Stat Spoyalapob shad. Uh Slatil chad I'll teat salithali, I'll teaswatiftured at Spoyalapob.

Uyayushed Twatispoyalaps Ati Twashot Sidari. Good day, my name is Amber Sterud Hayward and I'm a Puallop tribal member. I live in Tacoma on the Puallop Reservation and I work for the Puallop tribe in our language department. So to Ember and many others, Mount Rainier is a strange choice. Rainier never even saw this mountain. He had no connection to it. The people who were here long before he or Captain Vancouver were even born, well they did.

um that the people who've lived here since the beginning of time referenced, uh it makes a lot of sense to me why why people would be upset and and would like to change the name.

So this desire to change the name of Mount Rainier, it's been around for a long time, probably ever since the name was officially chosen. But in recent years, as our nation reconsiders the uglier chapters of its past, momentum has been building. I know there's always been a discussion around what it would represent to to um not rename but name the places that had the name.

And the many names the mountain has had and still has, well those names are not the names of white guys from the other side of the world. They were born right here, in a language that grew literally out of the earth of this specific special place. For our people we speak Lishutseed and our dialect is called Twoshutseed and we were told that Twoshutse comes from the land. So that's why it's very important that our names

carry on each of those locations. There's a lot of times where the name something specific happened in that location and that's why a name was put on on this particular place. When we go to the mountains we're listening for Leschutseed. You can absolutely hear it everywhere. You can hear the animals speaking Lashutseed. You can hear the water speaking Lashutseed. So the word for river is stola. So when you're listening to the river it's Dolux, Dolux, Dolux, Dolux, Dolux, Dolux, Dolux.

Um you hear the birds. There's other birds that say squidsuit, squid soot. So we're we're listening for that lashut seed, right? It's it's in the land. The meanings are entwined with your And so, um the significance goes beyond just b s just some person, some arbitrary person. It's it's more of a a physical description, so it shows how connected we are to the earth. When you stick a a name on something, uh especially a person's name, it is it's taking a claim.

Taking a claim on something that's not yours. It never has been yours and yet you're here you are coming and and s and putting this name on it is is disrespectful um but it also shows the lack of connection that you have with the with the environment that you live in. English is its own mindset and in the language It's our ancestors

world view. This is Shay Squally, chairwoman of the Nisqually Parks Commission and Council member for the Nisqually tribe. So it's how we honor the first people of this land. It's more than a name change, it's about recognition, acknowledging Internalizing, being accountable, reciprocating, and demonstrating. I think renaming the mountain is one step toward, you know, some sort of solidarity and acknowledgement toward the indigenous people that live in Washington State absolutely.

it also allows us and helps us to revitalize our language as well. So when we're getting these Indian names back out in our community, um It it's very helpful to our identity and to our people and it allows the people who are currently living here to know that there were people here before they were here. These days, there's a little bit more of that knowledge spreading into mainstream culture here in the Northwest.

But there's a long way still to go, and restoring the name of the mountain to something close to its original, lots of people can get behind that idea. Lots of people have over the years, but it's a bit more complex than it might seem at first. More on that after the break. The Arbor Group at UBS has a straightforward mission to help you make the world a better place.

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There is some precedence for changing the colonial name of a mountain back to the one it was given by its first neighbors. In Alaska, for instance, there is The highest mountain in North America was renamed Denali by the federal government in twenty fifteen. President Obama will make history today in Alaska where he will rename the country's tallest peak.

The more than 20,000-foot-tall Mount McKinley will once again be known by its Native American name, Denali. But the effort to swap out the name of former President William McKinley, a man who never visited the mountain or Alaska, took 40 years. The push to change the name back to Denali has been in the works since 1975. Yes, yeah. we don't always choose one name for things. I feel like in English it's this this is this one thing and this one word and that's what we're gonna call it.

Um in our language we have multiple ways to say one thing. Um in the Lashutseed area we referenced our mountain as Tekotbud, Tekotma, Tekotba, multiple names. For the Pewallop dialect, for me audibly hearing, I've heard our people say it three different ways within our own language, within our own tribe.

Um and then it just keeps going and going with um all of the different tribes in the Lashutsi country and again, you know, spreading um across the Washington state. There must be a lot of different names for the mountain because As far as uh anyone can see it, the tribes they all used it. And so for

us to try to decide and all agree on one name um could potentially be hard or it might be easy. I d I don't know. But I think the important thing is to rename it. Get get that name Rainier stripped from our our sacred land. So one major difference between Denali and Rainier is that there was basically already one agreed upon original name for the Alaskan Peak. Another big difference.

Rainier is now such a big brand that reversing it might seem impossible. You know, we have Rainier Beer, we have the Tacoma Raineers, we have the this icon and everyone knows that is Rainier, so why change it? You know, and it's like You don't understand the connection that we as tribal folks have uh to this place. Well your your attraction and your uh your uh connection to the to the mountain is is strictly due to marketing. Ours is strictly due to culture.

Um, for me personally it is just somewhere where we can gather our medicine and pretty much um bring back our ancestral ways. Some people, like Shay Squally and Hanford McLeod, they hope that restoring the mountain's name could also help restore other connections, real and tangible things, like historic access to her natural resources. a lot of tribes use this mountain for their

sustainability. They go up there and gather. They do their um stuff. We all use the mountain. The mountain has a lot of a lot of that medicine, a lot of that uh uh material that we use for our clothing, for our For our houses and for our canoes. So you get you get different materials from from down here in the valley of of the river and the s and the sea to up above in the mountain, you know, and the um yellow cedar

the the wood's different up there. It's more dense and harder. So our people use yellow cedar for such housing and building materials. If it was your canoe and you know, things like that that in in When you get up uh up high you got bear grass, you got this you know, we call it Princess Pine and and just just to name a couple that we have that we go up and gather every every spring.

It is a treaty right of ours to to d the right to gather and hunt in our usual and accustomed fishing stations, villages, you know, and that's in the treaty. And so to to You know, look at Mount Rainier, how they've taken it and turned it into this recreational kind of uh setting, but it still is a treaty resource to our people.

It always has been. And I have been fighting for the last twenty five years to get rights to actually gather the bark and the grass and the teas and the roots. And so we've put together It should be clear by now that the name of the mountain, whatever it becomes, is intertwined with what it represents. Restoring the name would mean a lot of things to many different people.

perhaps most importantly, it could go some distance toward healing old, grievous wounds that persist to this day. We know what our elders went through and what our ancestors went through and um we all have intergenerational trauma and it does hurt trying to um get past that and Language is a way to not only revitalize ourselves and our people and um but it's it's just a way of healing. In the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds of the other. Our tribe.

But m tribes throughout the country. uh faced the boarding school massacre is what I call it. For more than a hundred and fifty years the US government sought to forcibly assimilate Native American children as the country expanded into their land. Hundreds of government-funded boarding schools were set up all over the country. Here is where our culture, what was left of our culture that survived.

The arrival of settlers was was beaten, raped, and murdered out of us in the boarding schools. There, tribes were separated, Native American traditions were erased. And survivors of those schools say they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Just yesterday, Secretary of Interior Deb Holland announced a new federal initiative that will quote uncover the truth.

and the lasting consequences of these schools. The elders in boarding schools they They were they went through so much they were not allowed to use their language and a lot of elders wouldn't teach it because they they thought it was bad. uh ingrained into them that it's it's a bad thing and it shouldn't be carried on and our ancestors persevered, they endured, they fought tooth and nail.

uh to hold on to the culture to the and to the language. I'm happy that our language survived and it's still here, it's still alive. And by change the name, I think we begin the process of saying, Hey, you know? You you failed. We never ceased to exist. Even at your best efforts, we survived. We endured. We stand here today strong. Uh we stand here speaking our language. uh celebrating our culture on a daily basis. Uh and we're not going anywhere.

I was always told this the the seventh and eighth generation of the treaty signers of eighteen fifty five are gonna heal from this and changing And bringing those names back is what that healing factor is. It's not just for us as human beings, it's for the mother earth that we're on. It's the fact that, you know, we're just again little worker ants here taking care of this for the next generation, not for us to, you know, uh uh conquer and rule all is how I look at it. So

If we change the name of Mount Rainier, the aftershocks have the potential to ripple across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. They're likely to be felt by everyone, native and non native. It could change the way we think about the land, the way we behave when we visit the mountain, what we choose to value when we're there, and where we go in the future.

And maybe that long dead friend of a colonizer, the one who never set foot on the mountain? Well his name might be the one that's forgotten. Except maybe when you see it on an old can of beer. I did not grow up speaking Lashut Cedar. I'm an adult learner of my language. and the work that I personally put into learning my ancestral language, my kids, my three children get to live in a world

where they didn't know that Leshutseed didn't exist. So the world that they have been born into, all they have heard is Leshutzid. And so for the future of the mountain to have a name change I would love for my kids to not remember that it was called Mount Rainier. to to live in a world where that has always been the name for them because that's the name that we use.

the mountain and for other people, for them not to have to code switch and go back and forth depending on who they're talking to. I I would love that they would just completely forget that name.

That's it for this week's episode and for season two of Crosscut Escape. Thanks so much for joining us. This episode was produced by me, Ted Alvarez, and Sarah Bernard. Our executive producer is Mark Baumgarten. Our theme music is By The Explorist.

Huge thanks to Crosscut video producer Beatrice Costellima, who reported this story, as well as to all the members of the Puallop and Nisqually tribes she talked to. We'll put a link to Beatrice's video about the mountain and its names on the episode page.

You can subscribe to Crosscut Escapes on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen. For more on Crosscut Escapes, go to crosscut.com forward slash escapes. And if you like the show, please review us. It helps other people find us. Crosscut Escapes is a product of Cascade Public Media. I'm Ted Alvarez. Thanks so much for listening.