Phoenix streets using 'Squaw' in name might be changed

Dustin Gardiner, the Republic | azcentral.com 

Every time Eddie Brown hikes his beloved Piestewa Peak, he passes by a street sign that still evokes troubling memories of the degrading way people spoke to his mother.

"Squaw Peak Drive," reads a sign at the head of the road leading to the gnarled mountain in east Phoenix.

Brown, the son of a White man and American Indian woman, said it reminds him of the people who called his late mother a "squaw" when he was a boy growing up in southern Arizona. She never protested the term, but he could tell she felt insulted, trivialized.

"It was a lesser reference," said Brown, executive director of the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University. "Every time I go up there and I turn on that street, I'm perturbed. It just puzzles me."