Washoe Tribe

For the team at Palisades Tahoe, it has been a year of learning and change. We are so grateful to our friends and partners, the Washoe Tribe, for their interest in continuing to work with us beyond the act of removing the resort’s old name.

Renaming a business with 70 years of history is no easy task. It’s not something anyone here at the resort had experience in, and it’s not really something that there is a standard roadmap for. While we thought it would only take us a few months to rename, it took us nearly a year from when we announced our commitment. While time-consuming, we made it a priority to capture community opinion via surveys, working groups, and one-on-one interviews.

In 2020, we made the commitment to do something that we should have done long ago: We changed our name from Sq**w Valley to Palisades Tahoe, removing a derogatory racial slur from our resort’s title. This change was the result of local people, including both employees and community members, working in tandem with the Washoe Tribe of California and Nevada to take genuine, meaningful action. We were lucky to have the support of our parent company in this daunting undertaking, but the planning and the changes happened right here in Olympic Valley.  

The Washoe are the original inhabitants of Da ow aga (Lake Tahoe) and all the lands surrounding it. Washoe ancestral territory consists of a nuclear area with Lake Tahoe at its heart, and a peripheral area that was frequently shared with neighboring tribes. The nucleus of the ancestral territory is bordered on the west by the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the east by the Pine Nut and Virginia ranges, and stretches north to Honey Lake and south to Sonora Pass. The territory takes part of two very distinct ecosystems: the western arid Great Basin region of Nevada, and the forested Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.