News Is A Conversation discusses this issue today here

OfCoffee: The idea that squaw means vagina (to use the polite term) first found its way into print in a polemical 1973 book, Literature of the American Indian, by Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek. Sanders and Peek, without offering evidence, advanced the theory that squaw derived from the Mohawk word ojiskwa' (sources vary on spelling), meaning vagina. This notion appealed to a certain mind-set and was circulated widely in the activist community. (Rest of post here)

JBelle: I just don't see it as a political correctness issue. Our neighbors down in Worley don't like this name because they believe it demeans their women. I know very little about it because this local area is not my ancestral homeland nor the hunting grounds of my people. If our neighbors don't like it, I say let's make change. Let's move on. We have kids to educate, sick people to heal, roads to build and truth to be found. That's gonna go so much smoother if we can all work together, respecting each other in the sincerest of manners. I have a good friend who has been a linguist with the Smithsonian for 20 years. We have enough collective history between us that I feel comfortable speaking for her. In a nanosecond, she would say this: change it. now.

DFO: I'm with both sides here. Political correctness, I believe, is part of this. I'm not certain that "squaw" meant "vagina" in the general American Indian population of old. But I know that it does today. Therefore, it's a put-down to a significant segment of the U.S. today, including the three North Idaho Indian tribes, and should go, as a measure of respect, if nothing else.

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