Term ‘Canuck’ stems from an unlikely place

That old nickname for a Canadian lies neither in Europe, nor Canada

When we celebrate Canada Day, we’re actually celebrating Village Day. The French explorer Jacques Cartier heard the name spoken by two indigenous boys on his 1535 expedition up the St. Lawrence River — they told him the way to “kanata.” The boys didn’t mean the entire region but merely the next village: Stadacona, where Quebec City now stands. In the Mohawk language to this day, kaná:ta’ is said to be the word for a settlement. Misunderstandings are one of the main ways in which languages change, so it’s not entirely surprising that the word for a village turned into the name of our country.

An old nickname for a Canadian — sometimes, but not always, used negatively — is “Canuck.” Today it refers mainly to Vancouver’s NHL team, but a generation or two ago, the term had a much broader use. The phrase Crazy Canucks, for instance, alluded to a bunch of Canadian downhill ski-racers in the late-1970s. Yet, compared to the origins of “Canada,” the roots of “Canuck” are complex and elusive. What experts now believe is, on the face of it, highly unlikely — but as I’ll attempt to show, it makes sense.

Over the years people have suggested that Canuck is derived from the Irish name Connaught, or the German word “genug” (enough), or a combination of the first syllable of Canada with the indigenous noun-ending “uc.” These ideas may sound plausible but none of them

East of the Great Lakes, ‘Canuck’ shed its Hawaiian past, acquired a new spelling, and began to mean a Canadian.

comes with any evidence and all of them, it appears, are wrong. According to the new edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, the true origin of “Canuck” lies not in Europe, nor in Canada itself, but in Hawaii.

In the early 19th century, the mainstay of the Hawaiian economy was whaling. Sailors from Hawaii and elsewhere in Polynesia worked on many New England whaling ships, and the Hawaiian word for a person — kanaka — jumped into American English. On the Pacific side of the continent, “kanaka” clearly referred to Hawaiians, as in this quote from 1883: “There are a few Hawaiian words introduced by the Kanaka sailors on the whaleships.” But on the U.S. Atlantic coast, experts suggest, “kanaka” was briefly a slang expression for any foreigner, especially a foreigner with darker skin than most Americans.

That applied to Polynesian sailors. It also applied to people from what’s now Quebec, many of whom had indigenous, as well as French, ancestry. They were, I suppose, precursors of the Métis. East of the Great Lakes, “Canuck” shed its Hawaiian past, acquired a new spelling, and began to mean a Canadian, particularly one who spoke French. The word’s first appearance in print, dating from 1835, involves an American who “distinguishes a Dutch or French Canadian, by the term Kanuk.”

The American usage spread north across the border, so that the author of a novel published in Montreal in 1866 could contrast a “fat-blooded Englishman” with “that Canuck Frenchman.” Occasionally, “Canuck” also served as a nickname for the breed of horse known as “Canadian.” These senses of the word were much slower to take off west of the Rockies, where the Hawaiian associations with “kanaka” lingered on. But as the decades passed, a Canuck became simply a Canadian — regardless of language or skin colour. The term had once been an example of American scorn, but Canadians transformed the scorn into pride.

I’m reminded that in his landmark book A Fair Country, author John Ralston Saul began by making a striking assertion: “We are a métis civilization. What we are today has been inspired as much by four centuries of life with the indigenous civilizations as by four centuries of immigration.” The English word “Canuck” — with its Hawaiian, French and indigenous roots — is a good example in miniature of what he meant.