Fairchild Air Force Base in the state of Washington is to rename parts of the base that bear the name of a decorated US Army veteran as part of a drive to reevaluate “historically divisive names”.
“We are renaming Ft Wright Village and Ft Wright Oval in base housing to Lilac Village and Willow Loop. This change is the result of long consideration by Fairchild leadership, in accordance with an Air Force directive to evaluate historically divisive names on installations,” Fairchild Air Force Base announced in a social media post Monday.
According to the Air Force Base, the move to erase Wright’s name from the installation was taken because his “brutal acts have a lasting effect that are still felt today by our friends and neighbors, the tribes of Spokane and Eastern Washington.”
Attempt to ‘Sanitize History’
Col George Wright (1803-1865), who served in the Union Army during the Civil War and was wounded in the Mexican-American War at the Battle of Molino del Rey was highly decorated throughout his career.
He was promoted in 1844 for his actions in fighting the Seminoles - a Native American people - and troops under his command successfully routed Native American tribes at the Battle of Four Lakes and the Battle of Spokane Plains.
Wright's achievements were such that he has gone down in American history as one of the architects of the land the US was to become, with bases and streets being named in his honor.
However, now his name is the latest to be “expunged”, regardless of past merits, as the military expands its effort to rename bases and units that are deemed historically controversial, most notably bases named after leaders of the Confederate Army.
Indeed, controversy was reignited around Wright’s name because of the tactics he employed amid the campaign against indigenous people to suppress their resistance to white settlers in the mid-19th century.
Thus, after the Battle of Four Lakes, Wright ordered the slaughter of around 700 of his horses so that Native American troops could not use them in battle, according to the Spokane Historical project.
Wright is also said to have deliberately set fire to native crops and hanged the natives he suspected of fighting his troops.
According to Spokane historian Don Cutler, “sparked by a need to show force and strengthen or create treaties, Wright’s advance devolved into a bloody and vindictive march featuring hangings, burned villages, lies and coercion and the slaughter of nearly 700 Indian horses.”
Nevertheless, some historians have defended the approach used by Wright at the time.
“Wright was a superior military officer and a product of his time. He and the fort are two separate issues and neither should be diminished in an attempt to sanitize history,” former Spokane Falls Community College history professor Rudy Alexander was cited as saying by Spokesman-Review.
Back in 1994, there was a push to rename Fort George Wright Drive in Spokane. It eventually became Whistalks Way, approved unanimously by the Spokane City Council in December 2020.
The decision by Fairchild Air Force Base comes after the US Army commission recommended new names earlier this year for nine military bases commemorating Confederate officers.
The Naming Commission, set up by Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, also prepared a list of names to be used instead, including women and Black Americans rather than white men.
For example, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which honors General Braxton Bragg who served in the Second Seminole War, the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, should instead be named Fort Liberty in honor of the quality of liberty, the Pentagon stated.
‘Cancel & Rebrand’ Drive
The renaming drive gained particular traction in 2020 in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. The ensuing national reckoning it unleashed targeted everything from military installations to buildings, paintings, vessels, signs.
Just recently, a tribal leader of the Blackfeet nation joined the Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names, which has the responsibility of recommending changes to hundreds of landmarks on federal land across the US.
For example, there are 600 federal land units featuring the name "squaw", according to the Native American Rights Fund, such as Squaw Lakes in Oregon.
The push to rename things has even affected household goods and sports teams: the major league baseball team formerly called Cleveland Indians, announced plans to ditch the name they'd been known by for 105 years and become instead the Guardians. Donald Trump, president at the time, denounced the move as “Cancel culture at work”.