President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday he will “bring back the name of Mount McKinley” to the Alaska mountain known as Denali that is the tallest in the United States.
The mountain, referred to as Denali by Alaska Natives for centuries, was officially named Mount McKinley from 1917 until 2015, after former President William McKinley who was assassinated in 1901. The name was changed to Denali in 2015 during President Barack Obama’s second term, with Trump vowing during his 2016 presidential campaign to undo the change and then backing down when Alaska’s two U.S. senators expressed opposition the following year.
On Sunday, Trump said during a speech at a conference in Phoenix hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action that he intends to follow through on the renaming.
“McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president,” Trump said. “They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people.”
“President McKinley was the president that was responsible for creating a vast sum of money in the United States that Teddy Roosevelt then spent, so let’s say that they were both excellent presidents, but McKinley did that and that’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it. I think he deserves it. There’s lots of things we can name, but I think he deserves it. That was not very gracious to somebody that did a good job. And as you know he was assassinated.”
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of Trump’s biggest political supporters in Alaska, wasn’t keen about the idea when asked about it nearly eight years ago. The Anchorage Daily News reported that Sullivan and fellow Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski met with Trump in March of 2017, and the then-president said “‘I heard that the big mountain in Alaska also had – also its name was changed by executive action. Do you want us to reverse that?”
Sullivan said he and Murkowski “jumped over the desk, we said, ‘no! No. Don’t want to reverse that,’” according to the ADN story. The story also states “Alaska’s junior senator told the president that Denali was the name given to the mountain by the Athabascan people more than 10,000 years ago. And Sullivan’s wife is Athabascan. If ‘you change that name back now, she’s going to be really, really mad.’”’
On Sunday, Amanda Coyne, a spokesperson for Sullivan, reaffirmed the senator’s opposition to reviving the Mount McKinley name.
“Senator Sullivan like many Alaskans prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago — Denali,” she wrote in a text message to the Empire.
Inquiries by the Empire early Sunday afternoon to two other high-ranking Trump supporters in Alaska — Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Rep.-elect Nick Begich III — did not receive responses as of late afternoon. Murkowski is among the most openly critical Republicans of numerous policy proposals and proposed staff appointments by Trump before and after the November election.
The original name — or names, to be historically precise — of the mountain is based on the Athabaskans’ Koyukon-language name of Deenaalee (meaning “the high one”), according to the book “Shem Pete’s Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina,” by James Kari and James A. Fall (which also uses both spellings of “Athabaskan” and “Athabascan” that remain in use). It notes the mountain actually has two names, with the second coming from the language of another tribal population in the vicinity of the mountain. Furthermore, “these names can apply to the peak Denali/Mt. McKinley, but more generally they apply to all of the high peaks of the Central Alaska Range.”
The official order by then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell changing the name to Denali, dated Aug. 28, 2015, notes “President McKinley never visited, nor did he have any significant historical connection to, the mountain or to Alaska.” Regardless, Ohio’s congressional delegation — McKinley’s home state — has made repeated efforts to return the official name to that of the former president.
The name McKinley was first bestowed on the mountain by a gold prospector in 1896 before the federal government made the name official in 1917.
Trump, during his speech Sunday, also said he would halt the renaming of military bases and ships from Confederate officials to something “woke,” and he will restore names like Fort Bragg to the North Carolina base now known as Fort Liberty.
“Woke has to stop,” Trump said. “Because along with everything else, it’s destroying our country. We’re going to stop woke. Woke is bulls**t.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
