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- By Judith LeBlanc
Guest Opinion. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to rename the country’s highest peak. Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans have called the mountain Denali for centuries. The United States bought Native Alaskans' land from Russia in 1867 while making war with Native tribes for land. In 1917, the federal government renamed it “Mount McKinley” in honor of the 25th president of the United States, William McKinley.
The government should have honored the history of the Native Alaskans, not a president who never even stepped foot in the territory.
Fortunately, in 1975, the state of Alaska changed the name of the mountain to Denali and officially requested that the United States do the same. Four decades later, in 2015, the Obama administration honored that request and restored the mountain’s traditional name.
That should’ve been the end of the story. Instead, Trump once again is attempting to erase our history.
Now, Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have co-sponsored legislation with the support of Native Alaskan Tribes to overturn Trump’s order and recertify Denali as the official federally recognized name, and they need our help to pass it.
In his executive order titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” Trump said naming the mountain Denali was “an affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements and his sacrifice” and that no one cares about the name change.
Koyukon Athabascans have stewarded the land since time immemorial as the original inhabitants. The name Denali, means “the high one” or “the great one”, which fits the country's tallest mountain.
To not just deny Alaska’s Indigenous peoples the right to name the land and their contributions, but also to honor a man who never even set foot in the state over the people who live there is to reinforce the dominant narrative that Native peoples are irrelevant people of the past.
Hawwih (“thank you” in Caddo) for organizing to protect our collective shared history from those who wish to erase it.
Judith LeBlanc (Caddo), executive director of Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund, whixh is a partner to Native Organizers Alliance.
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