||| FROM KEN CARRASCO |||
You may be aware that a proposal was recently submitted to Washington State to rename Harney Channel. Several of us, notably Stephanie Buffum of Shaw Island and myself, a resident of Orcas, realized that General William S. Harney (1800-1889), for whom the channel was named by the British around 1860, is not the sort of person who should be so honored. He was not only responsible for greatly exacerbating our local so-called Pig War in 1859 which almost resulted in armed conflict with Britain, but he also commanded the US Army attack against the Sioux in 1855 at the Battle of Ash Hollow (aka the Harney Massacre or the Battle of Blue Water Creek). He also beat a black woman to death in 1836, for which he was found responsible by both a coroner’s inquest and a grand jury.
Battle of Ash Hollow
We have also learned from credible sources that Harney very possibly committed a war crime during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Contrary to the Articles of War in effect at the time which provided for swift punishment and prohibited hanging except for very circumscribed circumstances, he hanged 30 deserters at Chapultepec instead of the more humane firing squad (the condemned were soldiers in the Saint Patrick’s Brigade who had deserted, but obviously not because of cowardice). He also delayed their execution and made them wait on the gallows until the end of the battle so they could watch the American flag replace the Mexican before they died. At the time, Harney was also convicted for insubordination in a court martial for another offence, but the conviction was reversed by President James Polk.
Henry Cayou and his wife, Mary Reed, were married 24 years until her death in 1912. Cayou was the son of a Lummi/Saanich mother and French-American father. Reed’s mother was Tlingit and her father was Irish-American.
We are proposing that the channel instead be named for Henry Cayou (1869-1959), who lived his entire 90 years in the San Juan Islands and was both born and interred here on Orcas. Both he and his first wife were half Native American and Henry lived in both cultures. He is the only Native American who has served on the San Juan Island County Council and, as chair, his signature is on the documents incorporating Friday Harbor. Henry Cayou was in multiple ways a positive force for our county and the quality of our present life.
Our proposal has attracted both local and national attention, and last year the respected Indian Country Today news outlet carried both an online story and an eight-minute news webcast which can be seen in this link by skimming to minute 19:00 after a thirty-second advertisement. In addition, State Representative Debra Lekanoff has very positively given us her support.
Our proposal was accepted for consideration last fall by the State Committee on Geographic Names and they will make a final determination at their next meeting on April 26. If approved, the proposal will then be passed up the hierarchy to the State Board of Geographic Names and, upon their own approval, the proposal will be passed on to the Federal government for their consideration. This could come as early as late summer of this year.
More detailed information can be read at our online petition, and you can express your support by signing the petition and additionally by leaving comments there which we will forward to the state board. Otherwise, you may also express support — or opposition — by directly contacting the State Board and Committee on Geographic Names via email at bogn@dnr.wa.gov or by USPS at P.O. Box 47030, Olympia, WA 98504-7030.
You can also telephone them by contacting their staff, Caleb Maki, at 360-902-1280. Finally, you can also directly contact us, the proposers, at: renameharneychannel@gmail.com.
This is an excellent initiative and I am delighted to see you are gathering additional momentum. It would be a step in the right direction to rename Harney Channel and honor Henry Cayou’s legacy. May it be so!
Do it.
Thank-you, Ken Carrasco and Stephanie Buffum for your initiative and perseverance in the renaming of Harney Channel. Your decision to honor Henry Cayou is perfect!
I support the name change to Cayou Channel.
But it does open up some interesting doors, for instance, the inglorious career of General George Pickett (Mt. Pickett, etc.).
Pickett was a washed-up Confederate General who also led the infantry in the famed “Pig War”. Here is a snip from Pickett’s Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pickett
” During the Gettysburg Campaign, his division was, much to Pickett’s frustration, the last to arrive on the field. However, it was one of three divisions under the command of General Longstreet to participate in a disastrous assault on Union positions on July 3, the final day of the battle. The attack has been given the name “Pickett’s Charge.” In February 1864, Pickett ordered 22 North Carolinians in Union uniform hanged as deserters after a failed assault on New Bern. His military career came to an inglorious end when his division was overwhelmed and defeated at the Battle of Five Forks.
Following the war, Pickett feared prosecution for his execution of deserters and temporarily fled to Canada. An old Army friend, Ulysses S. Grant, interceded on his behalf, and he returned to Virginia in 1866. He could not rejoin the Army, so he tried his hand at farming, then selling insurance. He died at age 50 in July 1875 from an “abscess of the liver.”[2]”
Kind of a slippery slope, but perhaps we should traverse it…
That Wikipedia entry also states that Pickett graduated last in the class of 1846 at West Point. Pretty undistinguished figure to name a mountain after.
Aren’t there REAL problems that need attention before submitting every person in history to current standards of behavior?
Where are you going to stop? The Americas are named for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant, navigator and explorer who claimed to have discovered ‘A New World’. That, of course, was fully populated with people who had been here for at least 20,000 years and probably much more! Is that fair? Is it right? I certainly don’t think so, but are we going to rename North America ‘Turtle Island’, as Gary Snyder suggested?
I share the sentiment behind this but the whole thing seems silly when there are real problems that could be addressed with that attention.
Ken Wood brings up an important point. Where do we stop with the renaming? And, also, is there something to be said for letting names remain so that the person can be remembered for the bad things they did?
We live on the shoreline east of the Orcas ferry landing and I lived with the name of Harney Channel for years even though I knew the namesake did some bad things. I didn’t think much of it. However, I eventually realized that Harney’s list of heinous acts was too long and too appalling to ignore any longer. And in answer to Mr. Wood’s valid concern that this holds people to today’s standards of behavior, General Harney’s behavior was considered appalling even during his lifetime by many of his contemporaries.
So I became one of the proposers of this name change. But I’m not automatically supporting others, such as removing Pickett’s name. I can’t describe a threshold where I can be moved to consider that a name should be changed, but the fact that they did not get good grades at West Point is far, far from an adequate reason.
Another motive for my proposal is that our society is in the process of reconciling our history of violence to the indigenous peoples who preceded us here and also we engaged in the slavery of human beings. (This might make it sound like my proposal comes from a political motive — but ironically I’m a veteran and this opinion comes from my service in the the military). General Harney’s violence against the indigenous peoples and black people cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed.
I support the name change but I do not support choosing a new name that is based on a historical figure.
Honoring someone with native ancestry seems noble but the natives did not often name places for people. They named places for the physical attributes or spiritual qualities that the place held. Individuals were not memorialized on maps in perpetuity. The land, sea, and its non-human inhabitants took priority.
The name “Cayou” is derived from the French word for “pebble” – reflecting Cayou’s French ancestry and this, indirectly reflecting the Euro-American colonialist project, which involved the forced removal or integration of Salish people from these islands.
Replacing one historical figure with another is therefore still an act of internalized colonialist thinking. To name a geographical feature for an individual with European ancestry is not really the act of decolonialization that it seems to be.
We know the original native names of the islands, perhaps an alternative name which more closely honors the native way of thinking could be chosen.
Ken,
Pickett was truly awful, even forgetting his bad grades at West Point. You can read about him yourself.
And David, I completely agree with you on new naming conventions! I’ve always felt it’s dangerous to put folks on any sort of pedestal because eventually… there can arise many a reason for those pedestals to be toppled.