Looks like the Squaw Peak controversy rages on (and a great site gets taken down by the PC squawkers). The usual gang of blubberers has descended on the Capitol to petition legislators to refrain from trying to get the name reverted—well, actually, to get the people responsible for approving the name change replaced with (presumably) people who will be in favor of reverting.
My favorite line from the article was from Piestewa’s mother, who said the following without a hint of irony:<blockquote>We should keep the name of the peak and not make it into a political issue that’s going to make the indigenous people feel, well, here we are, they are Indian givers again. For many years we allowed this to happen to us, and we feel very strongly that we don’t want that to happen again.</blockquote>
I also liked this quote from State Representative Phil Hanson, evidently a big fan of the bureaucratic passive tense: “My person has been impugned over this. I have been called a racist and worse.”
FYI to all the carpetbagging activists: 1) “squaw” is not an offensive term except insofar as Indians have convinced themselves of an origin that it doesn’t have, 2) Lori Piestewa was an unfortunate casualty in the Iraq Military Action but she was one of many Arizonans who were killed, 3) the circumstances of her death were utterly regrettable but not consistent with the level of valor and courage usually reserved for memorialization and certainly not worthy of changing the name of a major metropolitan landmark and the freeway that adjoins it, and 4) Lori Piestewa was not from Phoenix and her tribe lives in the furthest reaches of Arizona.
Those are the facts of the matter. They are indisputable. As I have said previously, I am not against renaming Squaw Peak as such. I am against caving in to the multiculturalists and the major appeasement this renaming represents. There are innumerable candidates worthy of the honor:<ul><li>Jack Swilling: founder of Phoenix</li><li>Barry Goldwater: Presidential candidate whose home is within sight of the mountain</li><li>Ira Hayes: a Pima Indian who was one of the Marines that raised the flag over Iwo Jima</li><li>Darrell Duppa: a founder of Phoenix that proposed the name</li><li>Carl Hayden: first U.S. Senator from Arizona and one of the founders of Tempe</li><li>George Hunt: first governor of Arizona who was elected seven times to the position</li><li>Dwight Heard: the Salt River Valley’s largest landowner</li></ul>And those are off the top of my head. How do Lori Piestewa’s accomplishments compare to theirs? Other than getting ambushed after veering off the caravan’s course and being the parent of two children, I haven’t heard of anything else she did. That is the travesty of this politically-motivated renaming.