After Denali name change, attention turns to South Dakota's Harney Peak

Gregory Korte | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Harney Peak isn't as prominent, geologically or politically, as Denali. Nestled in the Black Hills of South Dakota, it's one-third the elevation of the Alaska mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley. Although its craggy summit was once considered for a mountain carving of presidents, that honor went to Mount Rushmore 4 miles away.

Now that Denali's name is settled once and for all — at least everywhere outside Ohio's congressional delegation — the nation's biggest naming controversy falls to the 7,244-foot South Dakota summit.

The Obama administration's decision last month to rename Mount McKinley to Denali gave hope to Lakota Indians and their allies who are fighting to get the federal government to change a name they find offensive and inaccurate.

It's the latest controversy to come before the Board on Geographic Names, an obscure federal committee whose job it is to sort out naming disputes. Many of them are routine: Last week, it voted to rename Mud Lake in Oakland County, Mich., to Lake Hope, in part because there are 216 other places named Mud Lake in Michigan.

The board is also called upon to settle the most contentious battles at the intersection of language, geography and culture.

"There is no better argument for the importance of geographic names than the controversies that arise when someone, or some organization or some government agency proposes changing them," says Mark Monmonier, a distinguished professor of geography at Syracuse University and the author of From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame. He spoke Friday at a Library of Congress Symposium celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Board on Geographic Names.

There are, for example, 866 features in the USA that still carry the name "Squaw," which many Native Americans find to be a pejorative word for an Indian woman, even after the board renamed 246 of them. There are 617 places that have the word "Negro" — many of which were last renamed after an order in 1963 from the secretary of the Interior banning place names with a similar, more offensive, moniker.

There have been proposals from Native American groups to restore the original native names of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Mount Rainier in Washington and even the iconic volcano Mount St. Helens.

Then there's the case of Harney Peak, named for a particularly brutal Army general whom Lakota tribes blame for killing 86 people — including women and children — under Chief Little Thunder's flag of truce in the Battle of Ash Hollow in 1855.

Like Mount McKinley's namesake, Gen. William Harney probably never visited Harney Peak, which sits in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was named for him by a military surveyor before the Civil War.

"You heard this about Denali. People from Ohio said, 'Our guy was the first guy to come in and see the mountain, and he named it for President McKinley,' " Suzan Harjo, a Native American rights activist, told the board last week. "That's a direct act of white supremacy, to take a sacred place and rename it."

The Lakota and their allies agree that Harney Peak has to go, but — unlike Denali, which was the consensus of Alaska's Athabaskans — they're not sure what to replace it with. That's where Harney Peak gets complicated.

Native groups proposed a change to Black Elk peak, after a Sioux medicine man who converted to Catholicism.

The South Dakota Board on Geographic Names, which advises the federal board, settled on “Hinhan Kaga (Making of Owls)." There were two problems: Federal guidelines discourage use of parentheses, and the name sparked a backlash in South Dakota.

After five public hearings across the state and hundreds of comments from across the country, the state board reversed course, voting 4-1 to recommend the federal board retain Harney Peak. Chairwoman June Hansen said she wished there were room for compromise.

"It’s not an easy black-and-white answer," she said. "Does it offend me? No, but I'm not of that culture. Does it offend people that I know? Yes."

Many South Dakotans have nostalgic feelings for the peak, which they consider to be the highest point between the Rockies and the Alps.

"They took their kids there, they took their grandkids there," Hansen said. "And then there are some, not to be glib about this, that don’t like change of any kind. And we're a very conservative state. People feel the way they’re going to feel, and I can't legislate that. I can't fix that. But I wish we could have come up with something."

Unlike in the Denali case in Alaska, South Dakota's governor, Legislature and congressional delegation haven't weighed in on the change, but two state Cabinet secretaries have. The directors of tourism and wildlife say a change in the peak's name would result in expensive changes to maps and signs and hurt tourism by creating confusion.

The federal board has a complicated policy on offensive names. It usually defers to local usage but makes an exception when "a name is shown to be highly offensive or derogatory to a particular racial or ethnic group, gender or religious group."

The board's policy manual, last updated in 1997, says it's conservative on such name changes because geographic names are part of the historical record and "because attitudes and perceptions of words considered to be pejorative vary between individuals and can change connotation from one generation to another."

There are only two absolutes: The board will not accept names that contain two specific derogatory names for Japanese or African Americans.

The state board's recommendation is purely advisory on the federal board, although the federal board often gives deference to local opinion. A decision probably won't come until next year; the board was ready to decide whether the peak should be renamed Black Elk when another proposal came in for Thunder Mountain, starting the process from the beginning.

Whatever the federal board decides, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell did not hold out hope that she would intervene — as her predecessor did in 1963 and as she did last month with Denali.

"I didn't realize I had the ability in the case of Denali to make that change," Jewell told USA TODAY.

She said Denali was a special case because Alaska had urged a name change since 1975, but the board could not act. That's because 28 members of Congress — 15 Republicans and 13 Democrats, all but one from McKinley's home state of Ohio — introduced and co-sponsored 21 successive bills to block the name change over 40 years. Under the rules of the Board on Geographic Names, any kind of congressional consideration, no matter how perfunctory, precludes an administrative change.

Jewell overruled that with her secretarial order, citing a law that allows her to step in if the board does not take action in a reasonable time.

"I consider 40 years to actually be an unreasonable amount of time," said Jewell, an avid mountain climber who said she'd always referred to the Alaska peak as Denali. "I am not aware of any other circumstance like Denali where there is legislative support from a state that would trigger the secretary's involvement."