On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order which changed the official name of Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. The stripping of the mountain’s indigenous name glorifies the disrespectful, arrogant man who approved it and is dangerously reminiscent of America’s colonial habits.
WHAT IS DENALI??
Mount Denali, located in Denali National Park in central Alaska, is the largest peak in North America. Standing more than 20,000 feet tall, the mountain can be seen from more than 100 miles away on clear days.
Its white peak is a lovely, humbling sight, but it holds more importance than beauty. The mountain is the setting of thousands of years of Alaska Native culture and life.
The name Denali, meaning “the high one” or “the great one,” was given to the peak by the Koyukon Athabascan people, who have lived near Denali for centuries.
In 2015, the Obama administration changed the official name of the mountain to Mount Denali to honor Indigenous Alaskan connections to the land.
Trump’s executive order claims changing the name back to Mount McKinley will honor the nation’s patriotic heritage by naming the mountain after America’s 25th president, who was born in Ohio.
But replacing the Denali name takes an ugly eraser to Alaska Native history. It is a theft American colonizers and leaders have never stopped repeating.
WHY WOULD TRUMP MAKE THIS CHANGE?
Currently, many Alaskans – even Republican lawmakers – oppose the change. Of 1,000 Alaskans of voting age, only 26% were in support of the name change presented in the executive order, according to Alaska Survey Research, and both Alaskan senators – Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan – have expressed disapproval.
Unsurprisingly, many who support the change – such as former U.S. Rep Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio – are completely unrelated to Alaska and the Alaska Native culture of the Denali region; perhaps they are in need of a geography lesson.
Mr. President, Mr. Gibbs, Denali is located more than 3,000 miles from Ohio.
In reality, the absurd name change is as intentional as it is harmful.
Micah Morton, an assistant anthropology professor at NIU, explained understanding America’s colonial history is important for understanding why Trump would honor a president from Ohio with an Alaskan mountain.
Serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901, McKinley’s administration was primarily known for increasing tariffs, pushing U.S. influence in global affairs, colonialism and the annexations of Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
Attaching a white, Christian colonizer’s name to an Alaskan mountain is a powerful move because language – and names especially – hold invaluable power.
“There’s a lot attached to that particular name (Denali),” Morton said. “People’s histories and identities and ancestry, relationships to land that are enshrined, I mean in relation to Denali, and cosmology. And it’s about religion, it’s about politics, it’s about economics, it’s about livelihood.”
The act highlights Trump’s desperate need to lay claim to that which is not his, to define himself as a conqueror, and his complete denial of Indigenous history.
Trump has nothing to do with Denali – his existence is unfortunate, but infinitesimally small in comparison to the history Mount Denali represents. With this act, he dismisses more cultural and social significance than is truly fathomable; erasing Denali perpetrates a similar mindset that pushed Manifest Destiny during western American expansion.
“This land is seen as an idea of Manifest Destiny, and which is at the core, in many ways, of ongoing experiences of colonialism. So a lot of Indigenous groups at present in North America, including Canada and Alaska and the United States, for them this process is ongoing. It hasn’t ended,” Morton said. “So this, to me, is just another manifestation of that, this ongoing colonial mindset and of re-inscribing names, and not recognizing Indigenous, in this case, place names.”
To take this mountain and label it McKinley wasn’t America’s right the first time. And this time around, the name change is clearly a power play for Trump, severely disrespectful to Alaska Native land ownership and about as useful to the present-day nation itself as urinating on a fire hydrant.
America is still so far behind in making reparations for its wrongs. The National Parks themselves, including Denali National Park, were established through intense Indigenous land dispossession and oppression.
America has no ethical room to move backward.
“Making sure that treaty obligations are met, that tribes whose names were, who were removed from – no longer federally recognized tribes – that they be reinstated, that they be given real autonomy over their land, and addressing land dispossession, that’s a huge matter,” Morton said. “And so this (the executive order) is a backlash against that, you know, an attempt to kind of, in some ways, return to those earlier (Manifest Destiny) narratives.”
Poorly disguised as an act of patriotism, the official loss of the Denali name is another testament to the oppressive state of America President Trump deems “great.”