diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 63dfa5592d..69293bb01b 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -189,6 +189,7 @@ Merged from 3.0:
  * Correct log message for statistics of offheap memtable flush (CASSANDRA-12776)
  * Explicitly set locale for string validation (CASSANDRA-12541,CASSANDRA-12542,CASSANDRA-12543,CASSANDRA-12545)
 Merged from 2.2:
+ * cqlsh copy-from: encode column names to avoid primary key parsing errors (CASSANDRA-12909)
  * Temporarily fix bug that creates commit log when running offline tools (CASSANDRA-8616)
  * Reduce granuality of OpOrder.Group during index build (CASSANDRA-12796)
  * Test bind parameters and unset parameters in InsertUpdateIfConditionTest (CASSANDRA-12980)
diff --git a/pylib/cqlshlib/copyutil.py b/pylib/cqlshlib/copyutil.py
index 5d6eb43f15..07613812c8 100644
--- a/pylib/cqlshlib/copyutil.py
+++ b/pylib/cqlshlib/copyutil.py
@@ -1817,9 +1817,10 @@ class ImportConversion(object):
         # these functions are used for non-prepared statements to protect values with quotes if required
         self.protectors = [self._get_protector(t) for t in self.coltypes]
 
-    def _get_protector(self, t):
+    @staticmethod
+    def _get_protector(t):
         if t in ('ascii', 'text', 'timestamp', 'date', 'time', 'inet'):
-            return lambda v: unicode(protect_value(v), self.encoding)
+            return lambda v: protect_value(v)
         else:
             return lambda v: v
 
@@ -2237,7 +2238,7 @@ class ImportProcess(ChildProcess):
         ChildProcess.__init__(self, params=params, target=self.run)
 
         self.skip_columns = params['skip_columns']
-        self.valid_columns = params['valid_columns']
+        self.valid_columns = [c.encode(self.encoding) for c in params['valid_columns']]
         self.skip_column_indexes = [i for i, c in enumerate(self.columns) if c in self.skip_columns]
 
         options = params['options']