Renaming Indian Head Highway seemed like a good idea. How did it go wrong?

Gabrielle Tayac, a Native American scholar and historian, still remembers as a girl hearing from her father the oral history passed down in his family for over 100 years: How the town of Indian Head and the highway through it got named. “We were driving down Indian Head Highway, and he said, ‘They killed our people and put their heads on spikes,’” said Tayac, an associate professor at George Mason University. “My father said, ‘That’s why Indian Head was called this.’”