Published Mar 8, 2024 by Yvonne Krumrey Anywhere you go in Juneau, there are mountains shooting up all around. Mt. Juneau and Mt. Roberts loom over downtown. Across the channel, Mt. Bradley – better known as Mt. Jumbo – notoriously blocks South Douglas from getting much sun. And in the valley, there’s Thunder Mountain — supposedly named for avalanches rumbling down its slopes.
A listener asked KTOO what the local mountains’ original Lingít names are. For this installment of Curious Juneau, Yvonne Krumrey spoke with Lingít educators to find out.
University of Alaska Southeast Lingít Language Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell says, from a Lingít perspective, the newer names don’t make much sense.
Twitchell said there are much older names for these mountains.
Twitchell said that for most of these place names, it’s not a matter of changing a name to a Lingít one, but changing it back to what it was called before settlers came.
“When we look at place name restoration, we’re not looking at changing things so much as saying it never should have changed in the first place,” he said. “We were here, we belong. The land belongs to us, we belong to the land. And this relationship is not something that anyone had a right to remove.”
Language learners are scrambling to record as many place names as possible, he said. It’s a race against time because the number of elders who hold that knowledge dwindle each year. There are just seven master speakers now.
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