What’s in a name? President Trump should not have renamed Mount Denali

I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, as a young man. On clear days, I would see Mount Denali, North America’s highest peak, rising to the north more than 100 miles away. 

Almost no one in Alaska refers to this majestic summit as Mount McKinley, although that was its official name for nearly a hundred years. Why would they? Denali is an Athabaskan word meaning the Great One, and President William McKinley had nothing to do with the mountain or with Alaska, for that matter.

In an act of bureaucratic hubris, the federal government renamed Denali to commemorate President McKinley in 1917, but Alaskans never got on board. In 1975, Governor Jay Hammond formally requested the  U.S. Department of the Interior to reinstate the mountain’s name as Denali.

Unfortunately for the Alaskans, President McKinley hailed from Ohio, and an Ohio congressman opposed the change. Then, in 2015, 40 years after the feds received Governor Hammond’s request, Sally Jewell, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, did the right thing and changed the mighty mountain’s name back to Denali.

Then, in January 2025, President Trump was sworn into office as our nation’s 47th president and changed Denali’s name back to Mount McKinley. 

That was a mistake.

Alaskans are not happy about President Trump’s preemptive decision, and they’ve raised many arguments in protest. I believe, however, that Hudson Stuck, who, with three other men, was the first to reach Denali’s summit, articulated the best reason for reclaiming the mountain’s Athabaskan name.

In The Ascent of Denali, Stuck’s account of his historic climb in 1913, Stuck wrote this:

[L]et at least the native names of these great mountains remain to show that there once dwelt in the land a simple, hardy race who braved successfully the rigors of its climate and the inhospitality of their environment and flourished . . . .

Indeed, for our nation to recognize North America’s highest peak as Denali is to do no more than acknowledge what is right.  Alaska Natives lived and thrived in a harsh land for millennia before the Europeans showed up. The Native name of Denali is the mountain’s proper name.

Note. I omitted an offensive Eurocentric phrase from my quotation of Hudson Stuck. 

Mount Denali: The Great One