WASHINGTON — The federal government’s official name for North America’s tallest peak is Mount McKinley.
President Trump reinstated the moniker on Day 1 of his second term with an executive order entitled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.”
But Sen. Lisa Murkowski is trying to re-restore a much older name.
“We have called it, this mountain, Denali in Alaska for decades, generations,” she said at a Senate hearing Tuesday. “The Koyukon Athabascan have called it, referred to it, as Denali for millennia.”
Murkowski has sponsored a bill that would nullify Trump’s name change, and change the official name back to Denali, which is often translated as “The Great One.” Alaskans feel strongly about it, she said.
“This is about respecting the original stewards of the land who gave this fitting name,” she said.
President William McKinley has no particular connection to Alaska and never visited, Murkowski noted.
A prospector named the mountain for him, and the government adopted it officially in 1901. The appellation stuck for the rest of the 20th century, despite a petition from the state of Alaska in the 1970s in favor of Denali. Murkowski and the rest of the Alaska delegation to Congress sponsored Denali bills year after year but the delegation from McKinley’s home state —Ohio — blocked them. President Obama finally stepped in and ordered the name changed in 2015. That held for a decade, until Trump changed it back.
Murkowski said her Denali bill is not meant to diminish President McKinley or his contributions to the country. And, she said, he won’t go un-honored.
“You've got the McKinley national memorial, the National McKinley Birthplace Memorial, the McKinley Presidential Library Museum,” she said. “You've got statues in Ohio, Hawaii, Illinois, among others. So this is nothing against our former president.”
An Interior Department witness at the hearing said the administration opposes the name restoration because it conflicts with Trump’s executive order on the mountain’s name.
Sen. Dan Sullivan co-sponsored Murkowski’s bill, as did three Democratic senators. Its prospects are uncertain. It could be negotiated into a package of bills containing the home-state priorities of other senators. Or it could be added to must-pass legislation. But if Trump insists on keeping the name McKinley, it’s not clear a sufficient number of Republicans in Congress would cross him.
