Mukuntuweap: The Name That Was Erased

The sign at the entrance says Zion National Park. That name is ten years younger than the park itself, and about a thousand years younger than the name it replaced.

In nineteen oh nine, President William Howard Taft signed a proclamation establishing Mukuntuweap National Monument. The name came directly from the Southern Paiute: Mukuntuweap, meaning roughly "straight canyon" in the Paiute language, a name that had attached to this place over generations of use and inhabitation. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah documents the name as part of an ongoing project of place-name preservation and land acknowledgment.

Ten years later, in nineteen nineteen, Congress elevated the monument to national-park status and changed the name to Zion. The word Zion is Hebrew. Mormon settlers in the canyon had used it in the eighteen sixties, drawing on the Old Testament imagery of a promised land. Federal officials and tourism promoters preferred it to Mukuntuweap because it was pronounceable and familiar to Anglo visitors. The name change was not incidental: it was part of a deliberate federal policy of replacing Indigenous place names across the American West with settler names, rendering the landscape legible to tourism and hostile to prior claim.

The canyon did not change. The red Navajo sandstone, two thousand feet of it rising from the Virgin River floor, is the same rock it has always been. The Paiute name is still used in tribal records and in the tribe's language revitalization programs. The federal name is on the sign.