Parks board chair touts use of Indigenous names
Many local landmarks had names long before Europeans arrived. And Vancouver park board chair Stuart Mackinnon thinks they should be acknowledged.
Mackinnon was visiting the Musqueam First Nation when the subject came up.
“We got talking about reconciliation and things that are going on,” said Mackinnon.
“Somebody mentioned that for them, it always was an issue that Spanish Banks was called Spanish Banks. These people came in on their big ships and stayed for a short period of time, three hours or three days, and the beach was named for them, when there was already a name for that place in the Musqueam language for lots of time before that.”
This week Mackinnon proposed fixing the situation.
“My motion had three parts,” he explains.
“The first part was for the park board to work with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh on identifying traditional names.
“The second part of the motion is, once those have been identified, that the park board acknowledge them. The third part was to work with the three nations on appropriate ways to acknowledge those names.”
The motion passed, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Spanish Banks will be renamed
(its Musqueam name) or (which is what the Squamish called it).
Mackinnon said in some cases, the traditional names may just be posted at the site, alongside the English name. In other cases, a name change could be in order, but that would be up to a future park board to work out with the local First Nations.
It’s a complicated issue, because the Squamish and Musqueam speak different languages, and have different names for various sites. Both languages also feature sounds you don’t find in English, which makes for spellings that may bewilder people.
In the early 1930s, Vancouver’s first archivist Major James Matthews produced several maps that showed the Squamish names for local beaches and landmarks. A stickler for getting things right, he even went to the Squamish council to make sure it was correct.
Thus Vancouverites found that the original name for the area around Lumbermen’s Arch in Stanley Park was Whoi-Whoi, that Kitsilano Beach was SkwaYoos and that Jericho Beach was E-Eyalmo.
But that was the 1930s. Written today, the Squamish name for Lumbermen’s Arch is the name for Kits Beach is and the name for Jericho is “Major Matthews was attempting to use English letters to capture sounds that are not found in English, that are only found in our language,” explains Khelsilem, a member of the Squamish council.
( Whoi-Whoi) is one example of that. There are consonants in the name that do not exist in the English language, so how do you represent those sounds?”
The Squamish nation updated the spellings to reflect the correct pronunciation. “These writing systems were developed back in the ’70s and ’80, working with our elders, and it’s kind of become the standard system,” he said.
“What a lot of Indigenous communities have done is create their own kind of system, their own pattern and their own set of rules around a writing system to capture those sounds that are not found in English. They are using the Latin alphabet, that’s why you see things like an x underlined or a k underlined and things like that.”
The Squamish nation has put up a map on its website that shows the traditional names, and also has an audio clip with the pronunciation. The Musqueam have their own map with Musqueam names. Some of the Musqueam spellings are so unusual they couldn’t be replicated for this story, because the publishing system wouldn’t allow them to be copied and pasted into the copy.