The Myth of Mt. Denali

The decision to bring back Mt. McKinley’s name touched off outrage from those who insist that Mt. Denali was the original ‘indigenous’ name for Mt. McKinley.

But which “indigenous” name?

The National Park Service notes that, “no fewer than nine Native groups… used unique names for the mountain. There are five Athabascan languages surrounding the park, each with its own oral place name.”

And Mt. Denali is not even the right tribal name.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who co-sponsored the bill to change Mt. McKinley’s name to Mt. Denali, attacked President Trump’s decision to rename the mountain because Mt. McKinley “must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”

But the Athabascans don’t call themselves that, they use the name ‘Dena’. Athabasca is actually a lake in Canada. The name was wrongly applied by Albert Gallatin, President Jefferson’s brilliant but erratic French immigrant Treasury Secretary.

But ‘Dena’, like ‘Denali, has no great significance. Dena means ‘people’ and Denali means ‘tall one’. The Koyukon were giving pragmatic names to the world around them. It’s Westerners who romanticize them as exotic and spiritual antidotes to industrialization and development.

No one ‘stewards’ a 20,000 foot mountain and “time immemorial”, a phrase often used in land acknowledgements, would only date back to the tribal crossings across the Bering Strait. The history of this group of the Athabaskans traces back around a thousand years, “time immemorial” turns out to be around less than 500 years before the European discovery of America.

And Mt. McKinley isn’t even in the territory of the Koyukon.

The mountain is actually located in the territory of the Athabascan Dena’ina who called it Dghelay Ka’a.

So why was there a push to name it Mt. Denali and not Mt. Dghelay Ka’a?

Good luck naming a truck, a college or a whole bunch of companies Dghelay Ka’a. And a mangled version of the name, Traleika, is already in use for a glacier.

Denali (or at least once it was compressed from the original ‘deenaalee’) is much more marketable name than Dghelay Ka’a. Choosing Denali over Dghelay Ka’a was about Americans picking an easy to pronounce palatable name that still sounded exotic.

The name Mt. Denali wasn’t chosen by tribal peoples, but by Charles Sheldon, a politically connected silver mining tycoon, big game hunter and explorer, who was friends with Theodore Roosevelt. Sheldon liked camping in Alaska, but was no great scholar of the local tribes which is why he chose to promote the name Denali.

Advocates claim that calling it Mt. McKinley is colonialism and that calling it Mt. Denali pays homage to tribal peoples, but either one is in use only because the name sounded good to Americans. America is full of real or fake Indian names that the settlers chose to use.

There is no ‘original’ name for Mt. McKinley: there are apparently at least a dozen. Picking and choosing which one we would use was a choice that Americans, not tribal peoples, made.

What most of the names used had in common was they meant something like ‘big mountain’.

Denali is not some deep sacred lore. It means “tall one”. The Dena’ina name of Dghelay Ka’a means “big mountain”. So does the Deg Hit’an Athabascan name of ‘Tenada’ which the Russians used before they switched over to calling it ‘Bolshaya Gora’ which means, you probably guessed it, big mountain. Mt. McKinley is about the only name for the mountain that doesn’t mean something like ‘big mountain’’ in ten different languages.

“The Indians who have lived for countless generations in the presence of these colossal mountains have given them names that are both euphonious and appropriate,” Charles Sheldon complained. “Can it be denied that the names they gave to the most imposing features of their country should be preserved? Can it be too late to make an exception to current geographic rules and restore these beautiful names—names so expressive of the mountains themselves, and so symbolic of the Indians who bestowed them?”

It’s unclear if Sheldon, the man who gave us the name Mt. Denali, ever understood that all the “expressive” Indian names were just different ways of saying “big mountain”.

But then the name ‘Alaska’ really means something like ‘big land’.

Westerners seeking spirituality in the tribal peoples in the area assumed that living without technology they were more deeply connected to nature and their names were filled with meaning. In reality the names were often quite practical and not especially significant.

The romanticisation of tribal peoples was itself a form of colonialism. The insistence on ‘reverting’ to tribal names leads to a farce in which the wrong names associated with the wrong tribes are used and those names turn out to mean absolutely nothing of any significance.

The only reason there is any interest in what we call Mt. McKinley is that mountaineers began trying to climb the mountain shortly before a push was launched to make it a national park. Tourism became a lucrative source of income for local tribes. The people who actually climbed the mountain were usually tourists from the lower 48. Calling it Mt. McKinley helped sell the federal government on the idea by associating it with a martyred president. Climbers preferred to call it Mt. Denali over Mt. McKinley because of the exoticism of the name. Naturalists liked the idea that they were preserving an untouched wilderness by using Indian names. The argument about what to call Mt. McKinley was always a dispute among Americans. And it was always about the best way to market the mountain and the land around it to other Americans.

There are only 2,300 Koyukon left. And only about 300 of them speak the language that the name ‘Denali’ comes from. What they most need is economic development, not linguistics.

Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewell had insisted on pushing the Denali name change. Two years earlier, she had visited an Aleutian town mostly populated by members of the Agdaagux people and refused to allow them to build a road in an area where 19 people had already died due to lack of medical care. The road would have made it easier to evacuate patients to the nearest hospital, but Jewell told them, “I’ve listened to your stories, now I have to listen to the animals.” The animals in question were wildfowl whose lives mattered more than theirs did.

The Trump administration tried to build a road in its first term, but was overridden by two federal judges. Over a decade later, the case is still pending and more patients have likely died.

The western liberals who will fight to the death to use the incorrect name from a dead language for a mountain just to be able to call it ‘big mountain’ in a tribal language will also let members of tribes die rather than allow any development that would spoil their idea of an untouched Alaska.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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