Trump Picks A Fight With Native Americans

It was a show of respect to Native Americans when President Obama on Sunday restored the name of the nation’s tallest mountain, formerly called Mount McKinley, to Denali. So it makes a lot of sense that presidential candidate Donald Trump didn’t like it.
On Tuesday, the Republican front-runner promised that he would reverse Obama’s decision if elected president. Restoring the mountain’s name to Denali, he said, was a “great insult to Ohio,” because former President William McKinley was born there. To be clear, Denali is located in Alaska, about 3,000 miles away from Ohio.

It’s unsurprising that Trump did not express concern for insulting Alaska Natives, who have been calling the mountain Denali for thousands of years. The billionaire has a historically hostile relationship with Native Americans, largely stemming from the fact that his casino business competes with tribe-owned casinos. But it was never solely business dealings that soured the relationship — it was Trump’s willingness to invoke offensive, sometimes racially-charged language to come out of those dealings on top.

The most egregious example of this came in 2000 in upstate New York, when Trump began bankrolling an ad campaign to stop a casino from being built in the Catskills. As the New York Times reported last month, the local newspaper ads showed “hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia … [and] warned in dire terms that violent criminals were coming to town.”

“Are these the kind of neighbors we want?” the ad asked, referring to the St. Regis Mohawks Tribe at Akwesasne, which was planning to build the casino. “The St. Regis Mohawk record of criminal activity is well-documented.”


http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/09/01/3697495/obviously-donald-trump-will-reverse-mount-denali-renaming/