WASHINGTON — Sen. Lisa Murkowski introduced a bill Thursday that would keep the name Denali on North America’s highest peak.
“This massive mountain commands a reverent name, a steadfast name,” she said on the Senate floor. “Not the name of an individual, a person who comes and goes, who may have had an impact for a brief moment in time. But this is ageless, timeless: The Great One.”
It’s pretty easy for a senator to introduce a bill. Getting it passed into law is the trick. Murkowski said she’d raise the issue to the other senators. Some of them, she said, have geographic names back home they’d like to change, too.
“I'm just going to take it every day and basically create a movement,” she said in an interview in her office.
Denali stems from the Koyukon Athabascan language.
In his Inaugural Address last month, President Trump said he was changing the name back to Mount McKinley, the mountain’s official moniker during the 20th Century and into the 21st.
“And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs,” he said.
Trump then signed an executive order giving his interior secretary 30 days to make the change and also to update the official geographic names database.
With that, Trump rekindled a cultural crusade Alaskans fought for 100 years.
The Alaska Legislature passed a resolution last week calling for the name to remain Denali. State lawmakers passed a similar measure in 1975. The request languished for decades at the U.S. Board of Geographic Names. That’s because at least one member of Congress from Ohio always had a bill pending to keep the name McKinley, to honor the Ohio-born president. That’s all it took – introducing a bill – because the Board of Geographic Names has a policy to not act on any request if Congress is considering it.
Murkowski said she’s not sure her bill could similarly stall the name change, just by virtue of its introduction.
“It may, but I don’t know,” she said.
Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska is a co-sponsor of Murkowski’s bill, but getting many other Republicans in Congress on board won’t be easy because they’d be going against the wishes of President Trump.
Alaska U.S. Rep. Nick Begich said last month that any time he spent in Congress on matters that don’t produce jobs or a better economy for Alaskans was time wasted.
“I came here so that Alaskans could mine mountains, not name them,” he quipped.
