I was talking to the Mohawks who come to the Harvest Festival at the Martin Van Buren house every year and thought about the names of the places around here again. Here is upstate New York. It’s really wrong to name things after lousy people who don’t deserve respect like Henry Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant.
It’s not PC: there is simply nothing good about either of these creeps. Why do I have to speak their horrid names every time I talk about where I live and the river that runs through the great state of New York? Can’t we just get rid of the residue of evil? Giving a name to a place is an honor. Hudson and Stuyvesant do not deserve the honors. One was a murderer and the other a tyrant.
Here are my alternative suggestions for names:
Hudson should be Mimancanituck (pronounced My Man Connie Tuck)
Stuyvesant should be Hodgson, in honor of the Flushing Remonstrance promoting religious freedom against Stuyvesant’s religious tyranny.
Can’t we simply rename our own town and declare, for what it’s worth, that the Hudson should be called My Man Connie Tuck from now on? I would vote yes.