A suburban Chicago waterway and a western Illinois island have been renamed under a new national policy to remove their previous names’ use of a racist term for a Native American woman.
The water feature near Palos Park in Cook County was formerly called Laughing Squaw Sloughs, but is now known as Cherry Hill Woods Sloughs, while the former Squaw Island in Calhoun County has been renamed Calhoun Island.
The Chicago Tribune reports the two Illinois sites are among nearly 650 geographic features across the nation renamed on Sept. 8 following an order by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that declared the word “squaw” derogatory and created a renaming process.