The Myth of Mt. Denali
26th January 2025
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.
The fact that the Wicked Witch of the North is pig-ignorant is no surprise.