February 28, 2025: AlaskaStudying: McKinley or Denali?

[100 years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]

On two ways to contextualize formal renamings.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote for my Talking Points Memo column about the controversies over President Obama formally renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. I’d ask you to check out that column if you would, and then come on back for a couple more layers to such debates.

Welcome back! I’m glad that I focused most of that column on Native American histories and perspectives, and would very much still argue that any debate over such renamings which in any way centers white Americans is a non-starter from the jump. There is of course a good deal of irony (as the Sigourney poem I included in that post argues) in using Native American names for places that, in almost every case, have been forcibly taken from those communities, a removal process without which (for example) the National Park system quite literally would not exist. But at the same time, these places remain important (and in many cases sacred) to those indigenous communities, a key reason why they and their allies advocate for returning the names of places like McKinley to their indigenous names instead. It is, to be honest, the least we can do to honor those demands.

When we do, though, it doesn’t mean we should forget the complex and telling histories that led to names like Mount McKinley for a peak thousands of miles away from William McKinley’s Ohio birthplace. I tend to believe (as I argued in this post nearly four years ago) that the phrase “settler colonialism” gets used a bit willy-nilly these days without the necessary contexts and nuances, or at least without a great deal of thought as to what it helps us understand. But whatever we want to call it, there’s something profoundly telling about recent white arrivals to a place like Alaska deciding to rename one of its most striking natural wonders (and indeed the tallest mountain in all of North America) after a white leader with pretty much no connection whatsoever to that place (other than that he was president of the entire United States, of course). Such brazen intellectual ownership over places and communities in a setting with such rich natural and human histories is, I would argue, far more foolish than anything Seward could have ever done.

February Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?