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We tear down Confederate statues, so why do we still honor Adm. Samuel Hood—a British nobleman who never saw Oregon—by using his name for our mountain? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to use the indigenous name, Wy'east? —Willem V.
The poster child for Alpine indigenous-name reclamation in the U.S. is, without a doubt, Denali. The Alaska peak was officially known as Mount McKinley from around 1897 until 2015, when the original name was formally restored by the Obama administration. Surely, Oregon could follow this example—and right a great historical wrong—by changing Mount Hood's name back to its native equivalent?
There are a couple of problems with this. For starters, Alaskans—both First Nations folks and Europeans—had been using the name Denali colloquially pretty much the entire time. "Mount McKinley" never really caught on locally, and Alaska first requested the formal change to "Mount Denali" in 1975. (Yes, it took 40 years.)
In Oregon, by contrast, basically nobody calls the mountain Wy'east. Some scholars believe no one ever called the mountain Wy'east; that name, they say, was invented in 1897 by a James Fenimore Cooper wannabe named Frederic Balch, as part of his white-man's-burden novel Bridge of the Gods. This theory is not universally accepted, but it's the kind of thing you'd probably want to have a handle on before blowing a ton of money on new signs.
There's also the fact that Denali is objectively a bomb-ass name. General Motors even named a truck after it. Wy'east, by contrast, sounds jarring to English speakers. East of what? What's that apostrophe doing there? Is it a brand of yeast?* This is nobody's fault, but it's probably one reason there's been no Denali-like groundswell of support for changing the name.
Still, it's not like there's a compelling argument for the name Mount Hood, either—it's just one of many European interlopers skating by on inertia. Some people think we should call North America itself by the (rough) English equivalent of its name in various indigenous languages, Turtle Island. It'd take some getting used to, but you have to admit it does sound more like the kind of place that would be ruled by a giant orange raccoon.
*Yes.