JUNEAU, Alaska — One Obama administration action, the long-sought renaming of North America’s tallest peak to Denali, may be safe under President Donald Trump, a U.S. senator said.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan said the Alaska mountain came up during an hourlong meeting he and fellow Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski had with Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in March.
Sullivan said during a speech to the Alaska Federation of Natives that Trump asked if the senators thought the name change from Mount McKinley to Denali should be reversed, the Alaska Public Radio Network reported. Sullivan said that when both senators said no, Trump asked why.
“And I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, with all due respect to previous presidents, Alaska Native people named that mountain over 10,000 years ago. And by the way, that was the Athabascan people, and my wife’s Athabascan, and if you change that name back now she’s gonna be really, really mad,’” Sullivan said. “So he was like, ‘All right, we won’t do that.’”
The state spent decades trying to get the mountain recognized as Denali, an Athabascan word meaning “the high one” that Alaskans widely used.