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“[Navajos] tell in their Blessing Side stories that Navajo Mountain represents the head of the female and pollen figure called Tádidiln Dzil (‘Pollen Mountain’) or Ni’go ‘Asdzáán (‘Earth Woman’).”1 John Wesley Powell named it “Mount Seneca Howland,” after a member of his 1869 Colorado expedition who was killed by unknown assailants, but the name didn’t stick. As a name dreamed up by a bilagáana, it certainly was locally inappropriate. The current name is ultimately only slightly better.
A groundswell across North America to rename geographical features with Indigenous names appears to be more energetic in Canada than in the U.S.2 In January 2025 President Trump called for renaming Mt. Denali to Mt. McKinley, signaling a likely halt to efforts in Deb Haaland’s Department of the Interior to initiate geographical name changes that invoked derogatory terms for Indigenous peoples. A broader effort to return to Indigenous geographical names to our maps is far from complete. Mt. Taylor, for example, was so named for Zachary Taylor, whose lengthy military career subduing Native peoples culminated in the Mexican War before his short stint as President in 1849. It’s unconscionable that a mountain, one of the four most sacred to the Navajo Nation, should be named for a military man who worked so hard to cleanse Florida of its Seminoles. Mt. Taylor should have its name restored to Tsoodził. In a similar spirit, the Navajos should tell the rest of us how to relabel the mountain in this photo.
footnotes
1 Laurance D. Linford, Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland
2 In Canada: https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2019/10/08/reclaiming-indigenous-place-names/
In British Columbia: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/sessions/2nd_session_2021/documents/GEGN.2_2021_CRP118_12_IndigenousPlaceNames.pdf
In Alaska: https://anchorageparkfoundation.org/our-work/indigenous-placemaking/
In Australia: https://www.sbs.com.au/voices/article/reclaiming-dyarubbin-here-we-are-weve-never-gone-away/2a8ap2jt5