There is a game children play called “King of the Mountain.” The rules vary, but generally, kids race to the top of a mound and push or wrestle until only one child stands and is declared the king. Displacing other children on the mound is the only way to win, and the game often rewards particularly vicious players — those who will bite, punch, and scratch to get to the top of the hill and win the title.
It’s a game the Trump administration is also keen on playing. But in this version, physical violence is replaced by aggressive tariffs, hostile dealings with foreign officials, and fraudulent business practices. It’s also involved petty actions, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico and punishing those who refuse to adhere to the order, and renaming Mount Denali, in Alaska, to Mount McKinley; a change nobody — not even Republicans in Alaska — wanted.
Denali is a Koyukon Athabaskan word that means “the high one” — the tallest mountain in North America — and has been referred to as Denali until 1896, when it was rechristened Mount McKinley by gold prospectors in honor of then-Republican presidential candidate William McKinley: a man who never visited the region. In 1975, Alaska legislators began petitioning the federal government to change the name back to Denali, and in 2015, the Obama administration did just that.
“All of our land places had Koyukuk and Athabaskan names and identification markers before settler contact,” said Sonia Vent, a Koyukuk Athabascan elder in southeast Alaska.
Settler naming conventions, especially for mountains, often celebrate the accomplishments of a single president, explorer, or mountaineer, reinforcing the idea that the country was built by great individual men.
Settlers rarely name mountains after women, but they often name them after breasts. The Teton Mountain range in Wyoming, for example, is French for “breasts.” There are also multiple hills named “Molly’s Nipple” in Utah and a Nippletop Mountain in New York. Many geographic sites still bear derogatory terms for Indigenous women despite federal initiatives aimed at removing them.
This feminization of the landscape reflects a history of gender-based violence, an idea captured by author Susan Schrepfer in her book Nature’s Altars. “Nature was assumed to be feminine, but control over it was masculine,” wrote Schrepfer. “Rather than identifying a site embedded in time and place these designations celebrated taking possession as a manly act.”
In the early 1900s, domination of women and the environment was reflected in the acquisition of Native land and our erasure from the landscape. State and federal governments created a system of parks and reserves that professed to protect wildlife and landscapes, but also kicked tribes off the land with the assumption that settlers knew of better ways to steward the land.
“Mountains came to emulate in vertical space the social values of hierarchy and authority,” Schrepfer wrote.
President Donald Trump has been graphic in his characterization of this dominance, saying “drill, baby drill” on the campaign trail and when he took office asserting that the United States needs to enter an era of “energy dominance.” Even the term “natural resource,” equates mountains, plains, and bodies of water as resources for settler consumption.
“The idea is that Indigenous peoples are supposed to just go away,” said Niiokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, an Ojibwe geographer at the University of Victoria. “Renaming is saying, ‘Now that we’ve conquered you, we can remake this space into something that’s more beneficial to us.’”
Stripping an Indigenous place name and imposing a new one on maps, atlases, and our phones’ navigational systems is an act of colonial dominance. “It’s about control,” Smiles said.
It’s also about justice. Last year, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians achieved their goal of restoring the original name of Clingman’s Dome, on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The name is now Kuwahi meaning “mulberry place” in Tsalagi, the Cherokee language. And two years ago, in Colorado, Mt. Evans, a 14,000 ft peak overlooking Denver, was renamed Mt. Blue Sky after my tribe, the Arapaho, who are known as the Blue Sky People. The mountain was previously named for John Evans, Colorado’s territorial governor in the mid-1800’s. However, recent reappraisals of the man’s legacy — including his responsibility for the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre which led to the deaths of 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people — hastened the change.
Many places have multiple Indigenous names, depending on whom you ask, but that complexity is difficult to capture on a map, where nuance is lost. The nation’s first national monument, Devil’s Tower, in northwest Wyoming, has as many as 20 different names such as “Bear’s Tipi,” “Tree Rock,” and “Bear Lodge.”
“Our officialdom doesn’t really tolerate that,” said Tom Thompson, a professor at the University of Alaska who studies Tlingit and anthropology. “It depends on the capacity of the language to incorporate things like direction, action, relationality. A lot of other Native American languages are very good at that or have that capacity.”
In southeast Alaska alone, there are more than 3,500 documented Alaskan Native place names. Mt St. Elias is near Icy Bay, and the Tlingit name for the mountain is just that, Was’eitushaa ”meaning mountain at the head of Icy Bay.”
Elder Sonia Vent said care of the earth is baked into Indigenous languages instead of elements of domination she sees in settler’s names. “To live a substance lifestyle you need that deep, deep love for the land. For all the animals and the plants and minerals around you,” she said.
When the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, Native language speakers outnumbered those who spoke English. But English-only policies in boarding schools forbid the speaking of Native languages, so even though there are 20 Alaskan Native languages, nearly all are either endangered or extinct. Sea levels are rising, typhoons rip through communities, and increased erosion are driving people away from the coasts and changing traditional relationships with land.
In Glacier Bay National Park, also in southeastern Alaska, “Sitakaday Narrows” is an incorrect interpretation of the Tlingit word Sít’ Eeti Geeyí, which means ‘bay taking the place of the glacier.’
“That’s one of those names that doesn’t work well in English, said Thompson. But due to climate change the glacier is slowly receding. The bay is now, literally, taking the place of the glacier. “Agglutinative and polysynthetic describe most Alaskan Native languages, which just means they can accommodate lots of informational bits and terms as prefixes and suffixes,” he said.
To understand a place, one must understand language and vice versa: to understand language, one must get to know the landscape in the same way one would get acquainted with another person. “It’s about connection,” said Angela Gonzalez, an Athabaskan writer in southeast Alaska. “It’s not just the name. Go out on the land and have tea as a way to connect with the land.” She adds that spending time with rivers, mountains, and plains and learning their original names brings you closer to them, like any other friend.
Last month Mt. Egmont, in Aotearoa New Zealand, regained its original name: Mount Taranaki from the Māori word for “mountain peak.” The name Egmont, applied by Captain James Cook in honor of his friend John Perceval Earl of Egmont, has been an intense subject of debate since the 1980s. Perceval was a leader in the British Royal Navy, but died before he learned the mountain was named after him. With the name change came something else: Mount Taranaki was also granted personhood, ensuring legal protections for the mountain, its ecosystem, and its traditional relationship with Māori tribes.
Mount Taranaki, and its legal protections are in stark contrast with how the United States regards Indigenous lands and peoples. “Today Taranaki, our maunga [mountain], our maunga tupuna [ancestral mountain], is released from the shackles,” said Debbie garewa-Packer, leader of the Māori Party, last month. “The shackles of injustice, of ignorance.”
