DENVER — A gubernatorial-appointed group on Thursday will begin to discuss what geographic landmarks, if any, should be considered for name changes.
Gov. Jared Polis issued an executive order on July 3, setting up the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board. The board was created in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, which included outrage from Native Americans and other people of color around names and statues of individuals with ties to genocide of Indigenous peoples in Colorado. In June, a statue of Kit Carson near Civic Center Park was removed by the city.
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Carson's legacy included helping push the U.S. Army’s “scorched-earth policy, burning crops and starving the semi-nomadic Navajos into submission," according to the 2006 book Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. Carson's His campaign against the Navajo, dubbed the “Long March,” resulted in the deaths of one-third of the Navajo nation and their exile to a reservation that Sides described as a “concentration camp.”
The town of Kit Carson, in Kiowa County; Kit Carson County, the Kit Carson Correctional Facility and the Carson Army Base are among the places in Colorado named for the 19th century soldier and frontiersman.
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