From Mt McKinley to Denali: The Vulnerability of Places and the Memory of Names

With an elevation of 6,190 meters above sea level, Denali dominates the Alaska Range and is the highest mountain peak in North America. Denali, however, has not always been called Denali: for almost a century, its official name was actually Mount McKinley. In 2015 US President Barack Obama announced the renaming of the mountain as an act to commemorate the Athabascan peoples who have lived in the region from time immemorial and always called this geographical feature in their own languages. Building on a critical approach to toponymy, this paper will briefly draw the history of the two names and analyse the Denali-McKinley dispute as a discourse on the vulnerability of places and the power of names to shape national identity through memory. Indeed, renaming the US highest mountain by means of a native name has a symbolic function which aims to readdress American colonial history and recognise the cultural legacy of its native peoples. From this perspective, Denali – both as a name and a place – may represent the vulnerability of the American territory, a ‘body’ which has been metaphorically wounded by the scars of European colonisation, and the role played by names in remembering and commemorating the unsettled and unsettling cultural history of the country.