After Trump orders Denali to be renamed, a descendant of McKinley advocates for a compromise.

 Trump is advocating for the renaming of North America's tallest peak in honor of President William McKinley, a move that has sparked backlash from many in Alaska.

Jan. 24, 2025, 4:03 AM GMT+6

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office to rename North America’s tallest peak in Alaska, previously known as Denali, to Mount McKinley, Massee McKinley, a great-great nephew of the 25th president, expressed immense joy.

"He deserves to have the mountain named after him," Massee McKinley said Thursday. "He had unparalleled integrity. People respected him."

However, Trump’s decision is facing pushback, with several Alaska lawmakers, including the state’s two Republican senators, voicing their opposition. In response, Massee McKinley supports a compromise: the mountain should be called Mount McKinley, while keeping Denali National Park and Preserve as its name.

"The international community will always recognize the mountain and park as Denali, and we don’t dispute that," McKinley said. "But I think, from a national perspective, we can find a compromise. I don’t see a problem with that."

Trump’s executive order includes this compromise, proposing that the park’s name remain as Denali National Park and Preserve, even though the mountain would be renamed Mount McKinley. The mountain, which stands at 20,310 feet, was officially named Mount McKinley by the federal government in 1917, although Indigenous groups had their own names for it, including Denali, meaning “the tall one” in the Athabascan language.

In 2015, the Obama administration formally recognized the mountain as Denali. During Trump’s first term, he suggested renaming it to Mount McKinley, which has sparked opposition from Alaska's senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan.

Their offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but both senators have stated their disagreement with Trump’s executive order. Senator Sullivan, in a video posted on X, expressed his preference for Denali, calling it "the name given to that great mountain by the great patriotic Koyukon Athabascan people thousands of years ago."

In 2017, Sullivan shared that he had personally urged Trump not to alter the name, recalling that he had said, “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. If you change that name back now, she’s gonna be really, really mad.”

Trump had promised at campaign rallies to rename Denali in honor of McKinley, who served as president from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. McKinley’s presidency was marked by his use of tariffs, which Trump admired and often touted in his economic plans. Although McKinley had no direct connection to the mountain or Alaska, the peak became known as Mount McKinley after gold prospector William Dickey referred to it as such in a newspaper article in the late 1800s, in homage to the then-president-elect.

Sondra Shaginoff-Stuart, an associate professor of Alaska Native studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage, noted that the name Denali holds deep significance. "The mountain is so majestic. The name is a statement of recognition of Native people in their native language," said Shaginoff-Stuart, a citizen of the Ahtna Dene and Pyramid Lake Paiute tribes. "Taking that away is yet another way to not recognize those people. Native people have lost their land and their language, going back to the boarding schools and orphanages."

Massee McKinley, also the vice president of the Society of Presidential Descendants, mentioned that Trump had shared his admiration for McKinley’s business acumen and his desire to replicate that in office.

"I figured this would happen, and it did come to fruition," McKinley said. "I’d love to be a part of the signing process when they actually sign the proclamation for that."