Summary
Donald Trump’s pledge to rename Denali back to Mount McKinley has sparked widespread backlash, including from Indigenous Alaskans and Alaskan Republican lawmakers.
The Koyukon Athabascans, who have called the mountain Denali for centuries, consider the name sacred.
The Obama administration officially restored the Denali name in 2015 to honor Alaska Native heritage.
Polls show most Alaskans oppose the renaming, despite the state’s Republican majority.
Alaskan senators Murkowski and Sullivan criticized Trump’s move, while some, including McKinley descendants, support honoring the controversial 25th president despite his views on Native populations.
It’s Denali.
Oh, you mean
Mt.Denali, in Alaska? YepFixed it. Thank you!
Just “Denali”.
They’re not just “dismayed” (more like pissed the fuck off) because the mountain’s name was changed from its original name again.
During McKinley’s Presidency, he continued policies of displacing, discriminatingagainst, and abusing native people. McKinley signed the Curtis Act of 1898, which took away the sovereign status of the Five Civilized Tribes, overturned treaties and abolished the tribes’ governments, invalidated their laws and dissolved their courts. The Curtis Act called for the abolition of tribal governments, and was intended to establish the concept of individual land holdings. This Act extended all provisions of the Dawes Act to the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes, making large parts of these lands open to settlement by whites. It resulted in removing an estimated 90 million acres of land formerly reserved for Native Americans.
https://www.cityofarcata.org/DocumentCenter/View/7994/McKinley-War-and-Indigenous-Policy
So they are pissed off because it got renamed for a genocidal president again.
Exactly. And Trump is all for genocidal presidents. He loves him some Andrew Jackson.
Oh wow, sounds like he deserved what he got
Trump sure has some very interesting priorities.
The naming and renaming doesn’t matter to most, in our hearts we will always call it Sears tower.
I get the joke, but this is really, really bad. He’s renamed the mountain after a guy who was a contributor to the genocide of indigenous Americans. And not in a small way. Amongst other things, he (and congress) just wiped out their sovereignty.
Ummmm. They literally voted for this.
In 2016, he said he wanted to change it, and again, on the campaign trail, he said he was going to if he’s elected.
55% of them said “Fuck yeah”. They can go pound sand now. Herr GröpenFührer has spoken. They’ll forget about it when he sells Alaska back to Russia anyway.
55% of who, indigenous Alaskans? I am not seeing evidence of that anywhere. I am seeing articles about how difficult it is for them to even access polling places in the first place.
That’ll show those pesky liberal natives
Republicans are dismayed that he did this before making sure indigenous people had all their rights to vote stripped away first, if they weren’t worried about this hurting them personally somehow there is zero chance a Republican would have a problem with this
The title talks like it already happened, but the article text describes it as “Donald Trump’s pledge to rename Denali.” I’m confused: is this something he can just unilaterally do but hasn’t yet, something he already has done, or something that he’s proposing that needs some kind of Congressional approval?
Basically- he has done it, but we’re not sure if he’s allowed to.
Trump issued an executive order directing the relevant party (the Board on Geographic Names, part of the Department of the Interior) to change the name back to Mt McKinley. Controlling the names of geographic landmarks is a power that Congress delegated to the BoGN, so that they didn’t have to hold a vote on every single item. The Unitary Executive theory posits that, since the president is the head of the executive branch, any power delegated to any part of the executive branch is ultimately under the control of the president.
If Congress cared more about their own institutional power instead of partisan power, they would rebuke the attempt and clarify that, no, they set up a process and deviations from that process will not be tolerated.
My take on the likely outcome - people will sue (not sure if lawsuits have been filed yet or not), it’ll work its way up through the courts, the judicial branch will rule that disagreements between political branches is outside the purview of the courts (basically saying that if Congress doesn’t like what’s happening, they have the power to change the laws, so it’s up to them), and, since Congress is controlled by R’s, the name change will stand.
