Alaska officials have voted unanimously to change the names of a creek and a hill on an Aleutian island in response to proposals arguing they were offensive and arbitrary.
The features in question are “Nazi Creek,” a mile-long stream, and “Nip Hill,” a modest summit — both on the southeastern side of Little Kiska Island, beside the bigger, more prominent Kiska Island 242 miles west of Adak at the far end of the Aleutian chain.
The move comes after several years of efforts across the country, including in Alaska, to drop words and names with derogatory connections from maps, buildings and civic institutions.
Michael Livingston, who submitted the proposals to formally get rid of the existent names, said “Nazi Creek” is particularly offensive given the history of violence that took place during World War II in the Aleutians.
“During World War II, the Unangax̂ people — and millions of others — paid dearly due to the actions of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and their Axis powers,” Livingston testified during a meeting of the Alaska Historical Commission. “After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Dutch Harbor was bombed and 43 Americans were killed in Alaska. Then 881 Unangax̂ people were forcibly relocated. Forty-two people from Attu Village were taken prisoner of war, where 24 died.”
According to the United States Geological Survey’s database of domestic place names, the only geographic feature with “Nazi” in the name is the Aleutian stream on Little Kiska.
The term “Nip,” Livingston testified, was a derogatory term for Japanese people that came into use during the second World War. It was a derivation of “Nippon,” which is the name for Japan in the Japanese language.
Livingston is originally from Cold Bay and is a member of the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska. A retired police sergeant, for years he’s worked on a number of cartography projects to revise and highlight Unangax̂ history in the U.S. and Alaska. He’s also been steadily working to make Alaska maps more accurate. The explanation he’s come up with for why a creek and hill on Little Kiska got these names is: expediency.
Per the “Dictionary of Alaska Place Names,” during World War II the U.S. Army was putting tactical names on geographic features throughout the Aleutians. They did so in grids, and applied an alphabetized naming convention for each square. “Nip” and “Nazi” both started with N. The names were arbitrary, Livingston said in the proposals he submitted, possibly picked by young GIs who had the ongoing war and propaganda front of mind at the time.
His recommendation, adopted 6-0 by the commission, is to give the creek and hill names from Unangam Tunuu, the Indigenous language of the region. Moses Dirks, a member of the Sand Point Village tribe and expert on Unangam Tunuu, recommended renaming the creek “Kaxchim Chiĝanaa” and the hill “Kaxchim Qayaa.” The names mean “Gizzard Creek” and “Gizzard Hill” respectively — “Kanchix,” or “gizzard,” being the traditional name for Little Kiska Island.
“A local Indigenous name from people who have lived in the region for thousands of years is more appropriate than the name of Adolf Hitler’s murderous Third Reich regime responsible for millions of homicides,” states one of the two official name change proposals submitted to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Little Kiska is part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, and most of the land is owned and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now that the Alaska Historical Commission has supported the name change, the proposal will go on to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which will decide whether to switch the creek and hill names on federal maps.
“The process isn’t always entirely step-by-step straightforward … but in this case it is fairly straightforward,” said Katie Ringsmuth, state historian in Alaska’s Office of History and Archaeology.
If members of the federal board vote to approve the proposals, then federal sources will follow Alaska in renaming the two features in official materials.
For years now, and especially following the death of George Floyd and ensuing protests in 2020, Americans have been reconciling with ugly parts of national history and character in skirmishes over place names. Monuments have come down, sports franchises rebranded, schools and institutions renamed.
Under the Biden administration, the Interior Department began systematically renaming geographic features — including more than two dozen sites in Alaska — whose titles included a derogatory name for a Native woman.
Under the Trump administration, there’s been a push to halt or reverse some of those renaming efforts, including restoring the name Bragg to a North Carolina military base and ordering that the name of North America’s tallest mountain revert to McKinley from its Koyukon-Athabascan name, Denali.
