Edhat Staff
By edhat staff
The City of Santa Barbara held a virtual ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday for the renaming of Indio Muerto Street to Hutash Street.
In spring of this year, the Barbareño Chumash Tribal Council requested that the City rename Indio Muerto Street, Spanish for “Dead Indian” to Hutash Street, a Chumash term for “Earth Mother.”
The Santa Barbara City Council determined that the street name was not appropriate and unanimously voted on September 29th to rename the street Hutash, effective December 14, 2020.
The cost is approximately $1,500 to change nine street signs. The new street sign was unveiled at 2:30 p.m. Monday during a virtual ceremony that can be watched below.
Additional information on this renaming project is available at: www.SantaBarbaraCA.Gov/Hutash
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October 7, 2020: Indio Muerto Street to be Renamed Hutash Street
August 11, 2020: Santa Barbara City Council to Discuss Street Renaming
July 19, 2020:
I preferred Indio Muerto Street and see this as an erasure of history. The real-life dead Indian has now been buried in favor of a mythological construct. People are OK with the concept of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, so why not Dead Indian? I really don’t see how this benefits the Chumash. Indio Muerto was terse and in-your-face. Whenever I drove by it, it caused me to think about the awful history of the colonization of the Americas and the genocide of its indigenous people. Will I feel the same way driving by Hutash Street? Nope. Indio Muerto is dead. Long live Indio Muerto.
Finally the City did something!!! Amazing – oh total waste of time thou
There’s a lot of negativity in this town’s street names.
Are we going to change Salsipuedes (Leave if you can) St. and Quarantina (hardly needs explanation in the COVID era).
When we’re all deluding ourselves into believing that we live in Paradise, these street names tell a different story.
Too bad that idiotic people are trying to erase history.
Or maybe it’s just a way of inflating real-estate values in areas with offbeat names.
Baby-cakes..
It’s kinda of “Ooo-tsh” in prounounciation.
All others…sorry to deflate your manifest-destiny party, but…
psssssssss.
How WOKE.
If “hutash” is pronounced “oootsh” where did the spelling come from? It should be spelled as it is pronounced or reasonably close to it. Please change the signage!
Not sure “remembrance” of one unknown dead Indian on one street is worth offending a lot of living descendants of that or other Indians. I think a lot of people (myself included) liked the name Indio Muerto because it was unusual, kind of indecorous, entertaining, not so much because we care deeply about the historical event of someone finding a deceased native person there.