We are at Michele’s family’s mountain cabin in what was formally known as Squaw Valley. When we got here, the Truckee River was almost dry with shallow pools of standing water, and the creek behind Michele’s place was even drier. Then it started to rain and rain and rain, just constant, heavy, rain for two days. During that time, the creek went from “Oh, good, there’s water in the Creek.” to “Holy shit, the creek might jump its banks.” Sunday, we spent the day watching Max Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton in a tight race at the United States Grand Prix and running to the windows to watch the Creek rise. Sunday, as the light started to fade, the rain changed to snow, just as Weather Underground predicted and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

After two days of listening to the constant sound of rain on the roof and the roar of the Creek, the snow brought a welcome silence with big snowflakes floating down like the remnants of a pillow fight covering the landscape. In one night, late summer has changed to winter.

Local lore says that this area has been called Squaw Valley since the 1850s when a couple of white explorers came across a group of Indigenous women working in the meadow. A hundred years later, Alex Cushing named his new ski resort after the valley. At the time of the ski resort naming, Cushing – and many of the rest of us – probably did not consider it a racial or sexual slur, but the local members of the Washoe Tribe do and they have been working to get it changed.

Now the owners of the ski area have renamed the ski area Palisades Tahoe which has left the valley below the ski area is sort of in a linguistic limbo. Because Squaw Valley has been a  census-designated place located near Fresno, California, since 1879, the valley below the Ski Resort has always had an official postal address of Olympic Valley. The rub is that everybody, from out-of-town skiers to the locals, calls Olympic Valley Squaw Valley or just Squaw, and very few people want to change. They feel that they have been calling it Squaw their entire lives and, since they do not mean it as a slur, they should have the right to call it what they want.

I don’t hold that position, I think that anybody and everybody has the right to determine what offends them. If somebody calls me a heeb, I have the right to be offended and, if the person calling me a heeb says that they don’t mean it as a slur, that doesn’t trump my right to be offended. They can continue to call me that – their right is even enshrined in the US Constitution – but they’ll be demonstrating that they don’t care about my feelings. In effect, they’ll be declaring that they either want to offend me or, at best, don’t give a shit about me.

I realize that this is also somewhat of a slippery slope. When people started tearing down statues of southern secessionists, or traitors if you prefer, I understood their anger, but when people started talking about changing the name of Sir Francis Drake Blvd*, I was taken back at first. But if the original settlers, the Coastal Miwok, find that name offensive, I think we should change it to a more neutral name. I don’t know how far into the rabbit-hole we should follow this string of thought but there is no doubt that we white people have labeled the landscape in a ratio out of proportion to our number (and actual contributions). That that labeling is now being challenged is not always an easy concept to accept.

*I originally wrote St. Francis but Gina Matesic pointed out that I had the wrong dude.