In 1896, a gold prospector named William Dickey led a journey through what he called the “wonderful wilderness” of Alaska, where he glimpsed an enormous mountain that compelled his “unbounded admiration.” When he emerged from the Alaskan interior, the first news he heard was that William McKinley, the former governor of Ohio, had received the Republican nomination for president.
And so, in the kind of random act that so often accompanies the colonial naming of geographic “discoveries,” Dickey and his comrades decided to bestow the name McKinley upon the huge peak. It caught on enough that Congress made the name official in 1917 when it created Mount McKinley National Park.
But the mountain — the tallest in North America, scraping the sky at 20,310 feet — had already held another name for centuries. In Koyukon, a language of the Athabaskan people for whom the mountain plays a central role in their creation story, it is known as “the high one” or “the great one”: Denali. In 2015 President Barack Obama officially restored that name, noting that McKinley had “never set foot in Alaska” and that “Denali is a site of significant cultural importance to many Alaska Natives.”
What to call the mountain had been a matter of debate even before Congress officially named it 108 years ago. The British-born mountaineer Hudson Stuck, an Alaska transplant who was a leader of the 1913 expedition that first summited the peak, called for “the restoration to the greatest mountain in North America of its immemorial native name” in his 1914 book, “The Ascent of Denali.” He pointed out “a certain ruthless arrogance” that “contemptuously ignores the native names of conspicuous natural objects” that are “almost always appropriate and significant, and overlays them with names that are, commonly, neither the one nor the other.”
Now President Trump has done exactly that. In one of the first acts on his return to the White House, he issued an executive order restoring McKinley as the mountain’s official name. (The national park that surrounds it will remain Denali National Park and Preserve; changing it would most likely require Congress to amend the law that gave the park that name in 1980.) The McKinley name change was recently entered into the government’s Geographic Names Information System, which lists the official names and locations of geographic features in the United States.
Which raises a question: Do we really need another mountain named McKinley? In addition to what used to be called Denali, there are at least a dozen other mountains or ridges in the country named McKinley, including in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Washington, according to the Geographic Names Information System.
Then again, William McKinley is a favorite of Mr. Trump, who has lauded that president’s championing of tariffs and expansionism. During his tenure, Hawaii was annexed and Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were seized by the United States. “He should be honored for his steadfast commitment to American greatness,” Mr. Trump asserted in his executive order.
The president noted the name change in his recent address before Congress, adding, “Beautiful Alaska, we love Alaska.” But Mr. Trump’s decision has not gone over well with his crush. Even before he changed the name, a poll found Alaskans opposed it by a 2-to-1 margin. The State Legislature passed a resolution last month urging the president to reverse the decision. And the state’s two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, are sponsoring legislation to rename the mountain.
“In Alaska, it’s Denali,” Senator Murkowski said in a statement,
Emily Edenshaw, president and chief executive of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, said that the name Denali “reflects a profound spiritual and cultural relationship with the land” and “recognizes the enduring contributions of Alaska Native peoples.”
Before Mr. Obama’s 2015 declaration, lawmakers in Alaska had been pushing for Denali as the mountain’s official name for decades. In 1975, the governor and State Legislature formally requested that the Interior Department name the mountain Denali, but that effort and subsequent requests were blocked by the members of Congress from Ohio, McKinley’s home state.
Mr. Trump’s decision to return to the McKinley name is a slap in the face of recent efforts to acknowledge America’s history of colonialism and restore Indigenous place names.
Mr. Trump’s executive order also ignores the history that cemented the mountain’s original name in our lexicon. Over the last century, the name Denali became entwined with mountaineering, the pursuit that made the peak famous outside Alaska, embossing its Koyukon Athabaskan name on American minds. General Motors even named one of its vehicles Denali.
In June 1913, the Athabaskan Walter Harper became the first person to stand on Denali’s summit as part of Stuck’s expedition. The endeavor took three months, starting with dog sledding through subzero temperatures; navigating the thick boreal forest, braided rivers and huge glaciers that had stymied the expeditions that came before; and climbing the flanks of the mountain that rises 18,000 feet from its base — 6,000 feet more than Everest from its base.
In 1970, the first all-women’s team to ascend the mountain carried a flag to the summit emblazoned with the moniker “Denali Damsels.”
When President Obama used his executive power to officially call the peak Denali, he was only confirming the long reach of its Indigenous name. Regardless of Mr. Trump’s efforts to force upon it the name of a president who had never even visited Alaska, the mountain has always been, and will always be, Denali.
The post Denali Will Always Be Denali appeared first on New York Times.
