PALOS PARK, Ill. (AP) 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 shallow water body near Palos Park, now Cherry Hill Woods Sloughs, may be off the beaten path, but it represents a nationwide effort to remove derogatory words from place names.
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.
Traditional Indigenous foods like wild rice, bison, fresh vegetables and fruit in the Midwest are often inaccessible for Native families with low incomes in urban areas, and the recent inflation spike has propelled these foods even further out of reach