LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump's inaugural address added to the culture wars by announcing a name change for the highest peak in North America.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.
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FADEL: He issued an executive order for the name change.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So what's the backstory? Our team placed a call to Joan Antonson with the Alaska Historical Society to hear her view of the mountain - literally, her view.
JOAN ANTONSON: I'm in Anchorage, and it's several hundred miles from the mountain, and on a clear day, it stands prominently on the horizon. It's magnificent.
INSKEEP: Wow. Antonson told us the debate over the mountain's name dates back more than a century. In 1917, the area became Mount McKinley National Park, named after a president who'd never been there but had been assassinated some years earlier.
FADEL: Decades later, in the 1970s, a movement emerged to change the name. Native Alaskan groups used a variety of names for the mountain, and they settled on one.
ANTONSON: Denali is a Koyukon word that means the high one or the big one.
INSKEEP: Took a while, but the park was eventually renamed Denali National Park. And then during the Obama administration in 2016, the mountain was renamed Denali, too.
ANTONSON: There may have been some who opposed it, but they didn't call me (laughter) or send me letters or emails to that effect.
FADEL: Both of Alaska's U.S. senators are against the move. They say there is only one name worthy of the peak bestowed upon it by Alaska's native people - the name Denali. So how will Antonson refer to the mountain going forward?
ANTONSON: Well, if I'm writing something as a historian, and that's the way it is referred to in something I'm referencing, I'll maybe put a footnote in to note that (laughter) that's the former name of the mountain known as Denali.
INSKEEP: People may call it what they like, but in 30 days, the official name returns to that of one of Trump's favorite presidents, who governed during the gilded age of millionaires - years when the United States added an empire, and the government paid for itself through high tariffs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SYML'S "ALL OF US") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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