Poldine Carlo, an Athabascan elder from Nulato, was in her late 90s when she performed her Denali song in 2017 at a conference in Holy Cross on the Yukon River. In a raspy, aging voice, she did her best to belt out the song. The refrain, which she sang in her Koyukon dialect, was “Say Denali. Say Denali.”
Angela Gonzalez remembers hearing the song when Carlo sang it for President Barack Obama during his visit to Alaska in 2015, the summer his administration changed the name of the nation’s tallest mountain from McKinley back to Denali.
“It just felt so good,” she says. “And it was healing.”
That year, Gonzalez wrote about the joy she felt over the return of the ancient name in her blog, Athabascan Woman.
“It felt like Alaska Natives were given back something taken away from us,” she wrote. “People may think colonization is just something that you read about in textbooks. It is a very real thing when you see names like Mount McKinley take over our place.”
Then, earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to once again rename the mountain as Mount McKinley.
“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs,” he said at his inauguration.
Gonzalez says she felt hurt and angry after Trump’s order, if not defiant.
“What I call it is not going to change. And a law or an executive order is not going to change my relationship to it,” she said. “But to see it go back – it’s disappointing. Because I feel like we’re going back in a direction that we don’t want to go.”
For Gonzalez, the name Denali looms large in her own family history. Her maiden name is Yatlin, which means “runner” and refers to her family’s long history of running on foot to trade goods with other peoples.
“We were people who traded everywhere,” she said. “We have artifacts that are from other locations.”
Gonzalez says, even today, the name Denali stirs so many emotions, mainly the feeling of living in a great land with “untold stories from our ancestors,” stories that speak to their relationship to the mountain, even how it determines the weather around the whole region.
She says there are also stories about the vast network of trails that weaved around a group of mountains.
There is Mount Foraker, which was originally Sultana, Denali’s woman, or wife. And there is Mount Hunter, which was Begguya, their child. Like Denali, Mount Foraker — Alaska’s second-tallest peak — was renamed after an Ohio politician, Sen. Joseph Foraker.
Elders like Wilson Justin are familiar with these mountains. He grew up in Nabesna, east of Denali, which was an important landmark for hunters who sometimes had to travel far and wide to find food. He says the original names for this family of mountains explains why they are regarded as relatives in his Ahtna Athabascan culture.
From his childhood, he remembers stories about how the trail system went all the way up to Siberia and Canada and all the way down the coast to California.
“It represents something that was a part of our medicine people’s trails from as far back as we know,” Justin said.
He says there really isn’t a word for “mountain” in his Ahtna dialect, Each one was called by a given name, and they were thought of as spiritual points of light — maybe because of how the ice and snow on their peaks sparkled in the sun.
“You didn’t want to refer to those places in kind of a low way, a dismissive way,” Justin said.
He says elders spoke of them with reverence.
“Northern Lights are like, in the old stories — not the newer stories, but the really old stories of Ahtna — are messengers,” Justin said. “And in places like Denali, being a place that messengers would like to stop and touch.”
Wilson says he was taught never to act if he were entitled to the sky. For his people, Denali exists beyond space and time and is a way to connect to the universe.
“When you’re in that place, that location, the mountain will speak to the sky for you,” he said. “A really fascinating way of Indigenous people to be able to express continuity, to connect to your past and future generations.”
Attempts to dismantle that continuity are already underway. The U.S. Interior Department has begun to take steps to designate Denali as Mount McKinley, and Google is changing the name on its maps.
Justin says it may be hard for Trump to understand the heart-and-mind connection his people have with Denali, but he says that no matter what comes of the president’s orders, it won’t change how he feels.
“To me, it’s never going to be anything else,” he said. “Taking Denali down is his way of saying we don’t count.”
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