President missed Alaska opportunity

“The people are laid back, proud and friendly

like the perfect view of Mount McKinley.

Ya-Hoo, Mat-Su, fun is at its peak in the Valley!”

Those lines – which, if you’ve heard the song, will now likely be stuck in your head the rest of the day – are from a catchy jingle that has run for years as an advertisement for the Mat-Su Convention and Visitors Bureau. As of Thursday, the song was still being used in commercials, according to the bureau.

We point this out for a couple of reasons in the wake of the Obama administration’s executive order to revert to the traditional Koyukon Athabascan name of North America’s tallest peak.

First, there are going to be some unintended consequences to this change. In addition to the visitor bureau likely having to re-work its jingle, there are multiple businesses in the Mat-Su and elsewhere that will have to consider changing their own names. There will also have to be signs re-painted, tour guides updated and maps reprinted to reflect the change.

Of course, these are relatively minor issues when compared with righting the long-term wrong that is the idea that some D.C. politicians could unilaterally “name” a geographic feature that already had a name given it by people native to the area. But they’re not insignificant issues either, and seem like the type of things that should have been given consideration before Obama’s populist proclamation.

The second reason we point out the jingle is to correct what we feel is a widely reported falsehood about Alaskans’ vocabulary. While it’s true many people here have indeed always called the mountain Denali, it’s a myth that nobody here calls it Mount McKinley. The proof is in the jingle.

Yes, we Alaskans are fiercely independent people. But recent news reports that the entire state has been clamoring for a name change are a gross misrepresentation of the facts. What’s more accurate is that most people here couldn’t really care one way or another what the darn thing is called; we’ve got bigger issues in this state than cartography.

Which brings us to our final, and most serious point about this issue.

Changing the name back to Denali might seem on its face as a way to recognize and pay homage to Alaska’s First Nations people, but it does nothing substantive to address the everyday issues facing Alaska Natives. It’s a smokescreen designed to get reporters to write positive stories and for Obama to generate a lot of good ink for himself. But it does little else of substance.

Alaska Natives – whether living in the Bush or on the road system – face a myriad of social and economic issues that can’t be solved by paying lip service to their ancient place names. These issues include high rates of suicide, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and incarceration that are, frankly, an embarrassment to this state and to the nation.

Rather than this comparatively irrelevant name change, Obama could have made a much more powerful gesture by pushing for more Native sovereignty and self-determination by backing the increased authority of tribal courts. He could have announced that his administration would pursue new federal programs that would spur job growth in the Bush or fight suicide among young people.

For the most part, he did not.

While it’s nice Denali will be returned to its rightful name, it’s certainly nothing worth shouting from the mountaintops about.

President Obama had an opportunity to move mountains while he was in Alaska; instead, he just renamed one. That’s not enough.