With the prospect of Denali being renamed Mount McKinley, allow me to offer some historical perspective that supports a return to McKinley as the name.
As I looked skyward from my office deck on that first day of September, 2015, I watched as Air Force One began its descent here in Alaska. At that same point in time, then-sitting President Obama was peering out that same airplane’s window to capture a shot of North America’s tallest mountain, which he was concurrently stripping of the name it had been known by since 1896 — Mount McKinley.
Now known from that September of 2015 as Denali, the talking point was that this was a restoration of the mountain’s original name. In reality, however, prior to 1896, Mount McKinley had been known by a multitude of names depending on which group was speaking.
Most recent to 1896 the mountain was known as Bolshaya Gora by the Russians who had owned Alaska. Prior to that there was one Alaska Native group, the Koyukon, who called it Deenalee, which is the closest to Obama’s renaming as Denali. However, multiple other Alaska Native groups had their own names for North America’s tallest mountain. For example, the Dena’ina people called the mountain Dghelay Ka’a.
There was one thing in common, though, for all the names that Denali has shared apart from the name Mount McKinley. They all were simply direct translations of “The Tall, Big, or High One” — a physical description rather than an actual named name, as was the case for its naming as Mount McKinley.
— Dale Jay Walther, Anchorage
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