Slashdot Mirror
"McKinley" Since 1917, Alaska's Highest Peak Is Redesignated "Denali"
NPR reports that the Alaskan mountain which has for nearly a century been known officially as Mt. McKinley will revert to the name under which it's been known for a much longer time: Denali. President Obama is to "make a public announcement of the name change in Anchorage Monday, during a three-day visit to Alaska." Interior Secretary Sally Jewell's secretarial order of August 28th declares the name change to be immediately effective, and directs the United States Board on Geographic Names "to immediately
implement this name change, including changing the mountain's name in the Board's Geographic
Names Information System and notifying all interested parties of the name change."
Alaska has been trying to get this change done since 1975, but all the Congressfolks from Ohio have continually blocked it and/or introduced laws to try and make it permanent...for stupid Ohio-ego reasons?
It's also worth noting that McKinley never set foot in Alaska, never did a damn thing for them, and the mountain was named after him BEFORE he was elected. It'd be like Trump buying Pike's Peak and renaming it Trump's Peak or something.
... because it's not one of the 8 highest mountains in the world, the USGS has decided to declare it a "dwarf mountain" and says that it doesn't really count as a mountain. ;)
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
It can no longer be said that President Obama hasn't accomplished anything during his term in office.
Also "nailed", "leadin", "Daniel" and "Aldine". Less common examples would be enalid (marine grass), Delian (Greek league of city states), and alined (rarer spelling of aligned).
Thank you, grep and /usr/share/dict/words!
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
How is it that the Interior Secretary can unilaterally declare a name change? There has been a long congressional issue over this. It was a congressional act that named it in 1917. Note that it's mostly an Ohio (President McKinley was from Niles, Ohio) delegation that's previously resisted the name change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just another day in Paradise
Who said he was?
He's making Alaskans happy with the stroke of a pen. What's the problem with that?
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
2015 - 1977 = 38 years
The Interior Department said the U.S. Board on Geographic Names had been deferring to Congress since 1977, and cited a 1947 law that allows the Interior Department to change names unilaterally when the board fails to act "within a reasonable time." The board shares responsibility with the Interior Department for naming such landmarks.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f60262f7cb8a4363b3a38b7a035ed66b/white-house-says-mount-mckinley-be-renamed-denali
...McKinley had nothing to do with the mountain. Or even all that much with Alaska--it was not acquired by the US during his administration, became a district before he took office, and remained one for his entire term.
You mean, that it was named McKinley in the first place?
Because there was a totally arbitrary political renaming - but this one wasn't it.
Why fix small issues that take virtually no effort to fix when you can blow them off because there are much larger issues that are nearly impossible to fix.
I mean, my house has a foundation issue that will take a year or two for me to save up the money to repair, so it makes sense for me to stop taking out the trash and cleaning the cat's litter box. I have to focus on the big issue, right? The trash and cat shit can wait a couple of years.
I can't remember who it was... it might have been Halldór Laxnes... who said that a piece of nature isn't really a piece of nature unless it doesn't have a name. That is, the first thing people do once they start interacting with an object or place is to give it a name, and so once something is named it starts to become about the history of people rather than the history of the land itself. And that if you want to establish a real connection with nature, you don't go sit on top of that well-known named peak that people climb... you go to that little nameless stream or that remote nameless cliff or whatnot - places which tell only their own story.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
If Obama had renamed McKinley to Mt Obama, you might have a valid argument. All he did was what the state of Alaska had been asking for for nearly 40 years.
More to the point, it is what the locals wanted. Nobody in Alaska calls it Mount McKinley it has always been Denali. The Alaska state government calls it that as well and petitioned the US Govt to change the name in the federal government back in the 70s. Had it not been for some twat Congressman from Ohio this wouldn't have taken 30+ years. There is no liberal conspiracy, it just people who don't know whats going on making mountains out of mole hills.
Indeed. In mountaineering circles it's always been Denali as well. Pretty much every group that has a physical connection to the mountain has always called it Denali.
-Chris
I'm really, really trying... hold on, I think I'm starting to care... nope, lost it. Still don't care.
Trump announces that he will reverse the renaming if he gets elected
Hillary says it will be renamed to Mt. Edmund Hillary.
Hell, a president can change anything to anything with a stroke of a bureaucrats pen these days.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I'm not saying it shouldn't be renamed. I'm merely noting the 'monumental' efforts needed to update all existing documentation referring to the new Mt.Denali.
Well, they should have thought of that when they had to change all the books from Mount Denali to Mount McKinley
The cost isn't all that much anyhow. You ever see a map hanging on the wall with Ceylon or East Germany or Czechoslovakia or Yougoslavia? They become a footnote in history. current things like textbooks might get a sticky label inserted to note the name change, otherwise it's life as usual.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yeah, I can't possibly figure out why we would want to do anything for a people that were systematically killed, evicted off their lands, repeatedly lied to by the government, repeatedly had treaties broken by the government, kept from practicing their religion, had their kids taken away, had their sacred lands taken away for mining if anything valuable was found on those lands, shoved onto reservations (which could also be taken away if anything valuable was found there), and treated as inferior in every way.
Gosh, it's almost like we realized we were giant assholes to a particular group of people for a few centuries and feel bad about it.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
If Obama had renamed McKinley to Mt Obama, you might have a valid argument. All he did was what the state of Alaska had been asking for for nearly 40 years.
And basically everyone else EXCEPT Ohio had been wanting. So, majority rules sucka!
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
The name was Denali before the White Man reassigned the name to honor a white man. It'd been unofficially Denali to locals ever since. The feds refused to let the locals name it until 1980, when the federal park was renamed to Denali National Park and Preserve. It'd been officially Denali to locals ever since. Why should the feds disregard the local names for things, and force their own names on local features?
Learn to love Alaska
Or, it's you who is rewriting history. You're focusing on the fact that the South supported using federal power to back the Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution, and then to expand federal regulation of slavery via the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
But slavery was pretty much the only case where the South was for federal intervention. In practically every other matter, they favored local rights over federal regulation. The Civil War was about slavery, not states' rights. But because the North won, they got to abolish slavery and weaken states' rights at the same time.
As a friend often tells me, before the Civil War people would say "the United States are", and since the war they say "the United States is".
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Alaska is a huge expanse, over twice the size of Texas, constituting almost 18 percent of the land mass of the USA. Obama is the first sitting president to visit. Only like 750,000 people live there. Amazing.
At only 21000 feet, Denali doesn't even rank in Earth's highest (altitude) places. Remarkably it is in the top 3 for prominence. No longer will the mountain have to be referenced as "Denali (Mt. McKinley)" or "Mt. McKinley (Denali)". People will no longer have to explain the two names over and over and over.
If only he'd do something else reasonable like creating an executive order forcing the use of the metric system!
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
When I lived in Alaska, I never heard anyone call it anything else. Denali is its name (no Mt. in front of it). Only imbeciles from the Lower 48 think it should be referred to any other way. Living up there gives you a different view of the country, that's for sure. Seattle is the capitol of the world, Texas exists to be used as the butt of size jokes, and inhabitants of the Lower 48 are wimpy and clueless.
So..here we go with Obama and the PC folks, basically needing to re-write history again. No more old symbols, if it is something a white guy did, gotta take that down, etc.
Geez...why are we needing to tear down everything old or rename it in the name of political correctness or whatever. Let things be and build from there, eh?
every time i see someone whine about "political correctness", i notice what they're really asking for is continuing permission to be a jerk to others.
Denali was originally known by that name not only by native peoples in the area, but also locally by the state of Alaska.
so not only are you really asking, "hey, why can't i continue being disrespectful to native Alaskans?", you also hate states' rights. good work there.
Well, for one thing, Mount McKinley was just named that by some asshole during William McKinley's Presidential campaign, and somehow it took. It was still 'Denali' right up until Woodrow Wilson established McKinley National Park when the name was made official. There's no historical reason for naming that particular mountain after William McKinley, who's sole contribution to Alaskan history basically involves not offering to sell it back to Russia (who, while owning Alaska, named the mountain "Bolshaya Gora" which means "Big Mountain").
Of all the things to get upset about, this just isn't one of them.
Signed,
Someone sitting in Ohio right now, where we're supposed to be all fired up and angry about a mountain that bore the name of an Ohioan President being renamed by Presidential fiat.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.