Trump wants to change the name of Denali back to Mount McKinley

Dec. 23—President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said he wants to change the name of the highest mountain in North America from Denali back to Mount McKinley.

Alaska’s two Republican U.S. senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, immediately pushed back, saying they support the Koyukon Athabascan place name for the mountain. Denali was long favored by many Alaskans and used by Indigenous people here for centuries.

Trump made the suggestion Sunday in a speech to supporters in Phoenix at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest. He mentioned former President William McKinley of Ohio as a supporter of protective tariffs, which Trump has embraced.

“William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States…the vast sums of money that he brought into our country,” Trump told the crowd. “The person really who got us the money that President Theodore Roosevelt used to build the Panama Canal and a lot of other things. McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president. They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people….But 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 are lots of things we can name, but I think he deserves it. That was not very gracious to somebody that did a good job.”

Trump offered no more specifics.

The mountain, the highest in North America at 20,310 feet, was named Mount McKinley by the federal government in 1896 but was renamed Denali in 2015 by the Interior Department on the eve of then-President Barack Obama’s visit to Alaska. It followed many years of efforts by Alaska officials and Native groups to rename the mountain. It was renamed by then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell under a federal law that allows the secretary to make changes to geographic names through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, according to the department.

[Trump threatens to try to take back the Panama Canal. Panama’s president balks at the suggestion.]

The park was originally named Mount McKinley National Park in 1917. Its name was changed in 1980 with the creation of Denali National Park and Preserve. McKinley died without ever setting foot in Alaska, assassinated in 1901 at the start of his second term in office. Jewell’s 2015 order changing the name of the mountain notes, “President McKinley never visited, nor did he have any significant historical connection to, the mountain or to Alaska.”

The name “Denali” is derived from the Koyukon name and is based on a verb theme meaning “high” or “tall,” according to linguist James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in the book “Shem Pete’s Alaska.”

Both Alaska senators immediately pushed back on Trump’s remarks Sunday.

“Sen. 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,” Sullivan aide Amada Coyne wrote in a text message. Sullivan has been a supporter of the presdent-elect.

Murkowski, on social media, said, “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali — the Great One.”

Trump suggested changing the name back when he was president in 2017 and both Murkowski and Sullivan objected, Sullivan said in remarks to the Alaska Federation of Natives annual conference, according to an ADN article at the time. The senators met at the White House with Trump and then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to discuss Alaska issues, Sullivan said, including reversing Obama executive actions the senators had opposed.

At the end of the meeting, Sullivan said, “He looked at me and 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?'”

He and Murkowski “jumped over the desk, we said, ‘no! No. Don’t want to reverse that,’ ” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said he told the president 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,” he said he told the president.

“So he’s like, ‘all right, we won’t do that,’ ” Sullivan said.

U.S. Rep.-elect Nick Begich couldn’t immediately be reached on Sunday, and a spokesman for Gov. Mike Dunleavy had no immediate comment.

Watch Trump’s remarks on Mount McKinley:

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