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Donald Trump’s pledge to rename the highest mountain in North America has sparked backlash among some Indigenous Alaskans and Alaskan lawmakers, including Republicans.
Trump reiterated his intentions to rename Denali back to Mount McKinley during his inaugural address. Barack Obama had dubbed the mountain Denali during his presidency, undoing the 1917 designation made in honor of the 25th president, William McKinley.
The declaration of renaming has proved to be highly controversial. The Koyukon, an Alaska Indigenous Athabascan group, referred to the mountain as Denali for centuries before McKinley took office or Alaska became a US state.
The name was officially changed to Denali in 2015 to “recognize the sacred status of Denali to many Alaska Natives” though it is known by other names in other Indigenous Alaskan languages.
Alaska News Source reported research that suggested that Alaskans are against changing the name back to McKinley by about a two-to-one margin, despite Alaska being a state that is overwhelmingly supportive of Republicans.
Emily Edenshaw, president and CEO of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, told EarthBeat: “Keeping this name honors that connection and recognizes the enduring contributions of Alaska Native peoples.”
Alaskan lawmakers across the political spectrum have reacted negatively to Trump’s announcement.
In a video post on X, Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican senator, said: “I prefer the name Denali that was given to that great mountain by the great patriotic Koyukon Athabascan people thousands of years ago.”
Lisa Murkowski, another Republican senator from Alaska, said that she “strongly disagreed” with Trump’s decision to rename the mountain.
“Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial,” she wrote in a post on X.
But not every reaction to Trump’s announcement has been negative. Massee McKinley, great-great nephew of McKinley and a member of the Society of Presidential Descendants, told NBC News that his ancestor “deserves to have the mountain named after him”.
The choice to honor McKinley through the renaming of Denali is especially divisive due to the former president having racist views on native populations.
“We could not leave them [the Native people] to themselves – they were unfit for self-government,” McKinley once said in an interview about the Philippines and its people. “There was nothing left for us to do but to take them … uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.”
