The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which has final approval authority over name changes on geographic locations, is planning to vote on Friday on a proposal from Colorado to change the name of Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky.

Last November, Colorado’s Geographic Naming Advisory Board unanimously recommended approving the change to Mount Blue Sky, a name supported by the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma.

The recommendation went to Gov. Jared Polis, who forwarded it to the federal naming board.

But a request from a tribal government for a “government-to-government consultation” regarding the renaming abruptly halted the federal board’s vote in March.

The vote has been held up for the past six months because of objections from the Northern Cheyenne of Lame Deer, Montana, the only original Colorado tribe, which is vehemently against the Mount Blue Sky name. The phrase “blue sky” is part of the sacred Tribal Arrow Ceremony and, thus, the Northern Cheyenne believe it would be “sacrilegious” for it to be spoken in common language.

Northern Cheyenne tribal leaders have, instead, long advocated to rename Colorado’s most famous peak to “Mount Cheyenne-Arapaho.”

William Walks Along, senior advisor to the Northern Cheyenne Tribal President, will be listening virtually to Friday’s meeting and commented that, if the group decides to go with Mount Blue Sky, there’s nothing more that the Northern Cheyenne can do to change their minds.

“This is the same government who ordered troops to round up the Indians. Nothing’s changed. They have primacy,” Walks Along said.

The renaming of Mount Evans has been such a critical issue to the Northern Cheyenne that its tribal council traveled to Denver to meet on June 14 with Tanya Trujillo, the assistant secretary for water and science with the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Northern Cheyenne returned to Colorado the next month for meetings with Samuel Kohn, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund who is a member of the Crowe Nation.

Walks Along said he thinks Trujillo and Kohn were listening and holds out hope that the Blue Sky option is voted down.

From the perspective of the Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne, the Mount Blue Sky name “signifies our indigenous connections – the Arapaho, who are known as the?Blue Sky?People,?and the Southern Cheyenne, who have an annual ceremony of renewal of life called Blue Sky,” Fred Mosqueda of the Southern Cheyenne said.

Chester Whiteman of the Southern Cheyenne added that it combines both tribes into one name. The ceremony covers every living thing in the world, he said. 

The effort to rename the 14,130-foot Mount Evans, named after territorial Gov. John Evans, has been underway since at least April 2019, when “Mount Soule” was first proposed to the federal board.

That name was in recognition of the heroism of Capt. Silas Soule, who blew the whistle on the Sand Creek massacre in Nov. 1864, when 230 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho women, children and elders, who were living under a white flag of peace in Kiowa County, were slaughtered by Colorado soldiers.

Evans charged Colorado troops, led by Col. John Chivington, with eliminating all Native American activity in eastern Colorado and is recognized as complicit in the massacre by the descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. After a federal investigation of the massacre, President Andrew Johnson demanded Evans resign.

The site of the massacre is now a national historic site. 

The federal board is meeting in Portland, Oregon on Friday and has scheduled the vote at 2:30 p.m. Mountain time.