Little Kiska Island, at the far western end of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, is a remote speck of land that was heavily contested during World War II.
In an attack possibly timed to draw away U.S. forces before the planned invasion of Midway Island, about 1,100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military captured Kiska Island, along with Little Kiska, in June 1942.
While the Japanese occupation lasted a little more than a year, it left a far longer imprint on the map of the three-square-mile Little Kiska. A one-mile creek that flows southeast into the Pacific Ocean was named Nazi Creek — a designation given by Americans, not by the Japanese.
Until last week, when it was officially renamed, the creek was the only geographic feature in the United States with “Nazi” in its name, according to a United States Geological Survey database of place names.
The name was “arbitrarily applied to features in this area” by the United States Army Air Forces for tactical purposes during World War II, an entry in the Dictionary of Alaska Place Names says. The name appeared on an Army map in 1953.
The name was picked because the U.S. military needed a name beginning with “N” to correspond with the “N” square on an alphanumeric grid it had superimposed on the area.
The same approach meant that a small elevation on the island was called Nip Hill, after a derogatory term for Japanese people. The Japanese left, but the names remained on an island that has been largely uninhabited since World War II.
New names for both the creek and the hill were approved by the Domestic Names Committee of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. The federal board was created in 1890, almost 70 years before Alaska was admitted to the union in 1959 as the 49th state.
The creek’s new name is Kaxchim Chiĝanaa, which means “gizzard creek” or “creek or river belonging to gizzard island” in Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language of the Indigenous Unangax̂ people. The hill was renamed Kaxchim Qayaa, or “gizzard hill.”
Moses Dirks, an Unangam Tunuu expert, recommended the names because “gizzard” is the traditional name for Little Kiska Island, according to the Aleut Dictionary, compiled in 1994 by Knut Bergsland.
“A local Indigenous name from people who have lived in the region for thousands of years is more appropriate than the name of Adolf Hitler’s murderous Third Reich regime responsible for millions of homicides,” the state wrote to the U.S. Geological Survey in its proposal for the name change.
It said that renaming the creek “honors the Unangax̂ people.”
After the Japanese attack on the area, the United States evacuated about 880 Unangax̂ residents of the Aleutian Islands but they were housed in internment camps with terrible conditions in southeastern Alaska.
More than 80 of them became sick and died before returning, according to “Unangax̂: Coastal People of Far Southwestern Alaska,” a paper by Douglas Veltre, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
When Congress voted in 1988 to pay reparations to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II, the Unangax̂ people who were relocated also received compensation.
The approvals by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names mean that the federal government can now change the creek and hill names in its official databases, which are also used by commercial companies to create maps for the public. The U.S. Geological Survey has already updated its entry for the creek.
The campaign to change the names gained momentum this spring, when the Alaska Historical Commission voted unanimously to change them.
The changes were endorsed by local Native tribes, the Museum of the Aleutians, residents of Japanese and Jewish heritage, and the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.
Little Kiska is part of the refuge, which covers five million acres of protected land in the Aleutians. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages most of Little Kiska Island.
On its application for a name change, the U.S. Geological Survey asks how long the new recommended name has been in use locally. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources and the state’s Office of History and Archaeology answered simply: centuries.
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.
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