Just really briefly, this whole thing with changing the white guys' name of Mount McKinley back to the Athabaskan (or Den'ai peoples of Alaska) name of Denali is ridiculous for many reasons. I know how het up about everything all y'all white people out there get about "those savages running amok, renaming "Squaw Mountain" to something unpronounceable," but really, how imaginative were you in naming something so big a derogatory term used to belittle and defame an entire sex (female) of humans? Truly, the institutional and internalized misogyny and racism needs to be dealt with . . . beginning with how arrogant one has to be to rename a mountain that all y'all didn't even know existed until practically modern times!
Now, some state senator from Connecticut is throwing a fit and the AP published it? Sen. L. Scott Franz is decrying the unfairness of returning to the traditional name of Denali after naming his son after McKinley? Really? He went on to say that perhaps Obama should have let Alaskans vote on it . . . we did, back in 1975 and we asked for it to be Denali, not McKinley. It was essentially the Ohio delegation to the US Congress that kept Alaskans from changing the name officially.
Alaska Natives (polite stage whisper to everyone who has been saying "native Alaskans" during Obama's historic visit to Alaska -- a native Alaskan just refers to anyone born in the state. An Alaska Native is an indigenous person of Alaska . . .) have long referred to it as Denali, native Alaskans also prefer the name Denali. It was Outsiders (anyone not in Alaska or from Alaska) who insisted on calling a rose by another name. Being Alaskans, we shrugged and let y'all think you knew the name of our mountain . . . we are just happy that at least one Outsider realized the error of his ways and went ahead and made the appropriate name also the proper name of our mountain. Alaskans are mighty proud of their Denali . . . also, due to earthquake activity, our mountain is still growing, slowly, but Denali's gaining ground, so's to speak . . .
That's all I got time to write for now. Just had to get a couple things off my chest about the fabricated brouhaha about a traditional name coming back and winning out over some non-American (McKinley, I believe is a surname from Scotland, originally . . . another one of those illegal immigrants coming to our country in the hopes of settling down, maybe running the country for a bit and adding to the cultural appropriation of the indigenous peoples' heritage . . . ). I thought everyone was up in arms about bringing back traditional ways?