What's In a Name?

DURING A TRIP to Alaska in September, President Obama announced that the name of Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, would be officially restored to Denali, the Koyukon Athabascan name that means “the tall one.” This is the name the Athabascan people have used for the mountain for centuries. “This designation recognizes the sacred status of Denali to generations of Alaska Natives,” announced the White House.

Apparently, William Dickey, a gold prospector in Alaska, coined the name Mount McKinley “after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of [that] wonderful wilderness,” Dickey wrote in 1896. McKinley was elected the 25th president, but he was assassinated in his second term, never having set foot in Alaska.

Restoring the mountain’s rightful name has been a passionate issue for Alaska Natives for more than 100 years.

A few years ago a Native elder was asked for his thoughts on the millions of European immigrants who had flooded Turtle Island, as North America is known to many Native people, to establish a new nation. “They’ll leave,” he said. “Eventually, after they have used up all the resources and the land is no longer profitable for them, they’ll leave. They’ll move on to someplace different. And then we, the Indigenous people, will nurse our land back to health.” That is an incredible perspective from a wise man who has seen the lands of his ancestors senselessly exploited by generations of foreigners.

From a Native American perspective, the U.S. is a country of more than 300 million undocumented immigrants. People from all over the world have left their lands, their homes, their families, and everything they knew and loved to come here. They flocked to this “new world” largely in pursuit of a dream of financial prosperity. But they never asked for permission to be here, nor has permission ever been given.

These migrants are ignorant as to why the mountains lie where they do, why the rivers flow where they flow. As a result, they feel lost. They live here like one lives in a hotel room.

For the Indigenous peoples of this continent, however, our creation stories take place in this land. They tell us why that mountain sits where it does, and why those rivers flow where they do. These stories connect us to this land. They ground us. And they motivate us to live here sustainably.

Our uninvited guests desperately want to feel connected to this land as well, but they have no stories, no understanding. Instead they carve their faces into sacred landmarks and name mountains that are eons old after mere men who have never seen them.

My Athabascan relatives in Alaska have given the United States an incredible gift. They have fought to share the name of their sacred mountain. They are giving this nation of immigrants permission to use that name. It is an amazing gesture of both hospitality and mercy.

Perhaps it is also a sign of hope—hope that instead of waiting for their uninvited guests to leave, they might instead be willing to welcome them in, share their stories with them, and train them in how to live well within this land.