Fish Experts Try Name-Dropping Squawfish Now Dubbed ‘Pikeminnow’ At Request Of Tribes, States

It’s official. The squawfish is extinct.

There are still plenty of bony, bait-stealing “pikeminnows,” though.

An international committee of fish experts has agreed to change the common name of the squawfish to pikeminnow to avoid use of a term that is highly offensive to Native American women.

The change will be published in the journal of the American Fisheries Society.

That group and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists have a joint committee of American, Canadian and Mexican academics who establish common fish names. Decisions of the committee, headed by Dr. Joseph Nelson of University of Alberta, are accepted by numerous professional and governmental agencies in order to prevent confusion.

One of those agencies is the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, composed of 19 tribal, state and federal wildlife agencies in Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon.

The agency - which includes the Spokane, Kalispel, Colville and Coeur d’Alene tribes - began pushing for a name change several years ago.

Yakama and other tribal leaders objected to calling the fish a name that is derogatory to Indian women. The word “squaw” is widely believed to come from an Algonquian word for female genitalia.

That interpretation results from misinformation presented in 1992 on the Oprah Winfrey television show, according to Ives Goddard, head of the ethnology division of the National Museum of Natural History’s Anthropology Department.

Goddard said it is “as certain as any historical fact can be” that 17th-century English settlers in Massachusetts adopted the word from Massachusett-speaking Indians who used “squa” innocuously to mean “female” or “younger woman.” But he and others agree that modern use of the word may be offensive regardless of its origin.

In the Inland Northwest, the word is associated with abuse of native women by 19th-century fur trappers and gold miners.

“It hurt the native people very badly, and it is a word we want to get rid of,” said Barbara Friedlander-Aripa of the Colville Confederated Tribes’ Cultural Resources Board.

The Yakama Tribe suggested renaming the fish “bigmouth minnow” because it is in the minnow family and has a big mouth. But Nelson and his committee worried about confusion with the bigmouth shiner and other “bigmouth” fish.

The committee entertained the possibility of using a native name for the indigenous fish, but was unable to find any suitable ones that are easy enough to pronounce or spell.

Eventually, the committee settled on pike minnow - two words. There would be northern, Colorado, Umpquah and Sacramento pike minnows.

But there already is a fish called the northern pike minnow.

“It is one of the most popular game fish in the Great Lakes area,” said Frank Young of the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority.

Besides, the authority had already made signs saying “pikeminnow” - one word - based on the committee’s preliminary ruling. So Young filed a protest, and the committee made the name one word instead of two.

Young admits he liked the committee’s basic idea of making the squawfish a pike even though it belongs to a different family. He said pikeminnow sounded “more marketable” than the bigmouth minnow name his organization officially recommended.

Young’s job is to pay anglers $3 to $5 per fish to catch the unpopular northern pikeminnow, which congregate near dams and gobble up salmon smolts.

He said he talks to a lot of anglers, “and they all give me grief” about the new name. “They just don’t like the change. They’re used to squawfish.”

Mostly, Young said, the objections are “kind a backlash against political correctness. They just don’t get it: They say they didn’t mean anything by it when they said squawfish.”

He has an answer they understand.

“Basically, what I’ve told them is that, if you want to get the reward, you need to be calling it a pikeminnow. We pay a bounty on pikeminnow and, after this year, we won’t be paying a bounty on squawfish.”

Eventually, Young predicted, “everybody will finally understand and switch over, but it’s going to be a long one.”

Longer, no doubt, than the year Nelson and his committee spent coming up with the new moniker.

John Craig can be reached at 459-5429 or by e-mail at johnc@spokesman.com.