Pisiquid: A lake, river and Acadian village

It's amusing to hear people speculate on how and why places were named. Take Boot Island, for example. “The island was boot-shaped before the tides changed it,” is an explanation I've heard more than a few times.

Then I've heard it said that the Mi'kmaq had a word for the area and to the English it sounded like the word “boot.”

Hence that tide-swept point off Long Island, near Evangeline Beach, became known as Boot Island — only it wasn't a true island (or boot-shaped) since old maps show it was more or less connected to the mainland.

Mistaking a foreign language word that sounded like “boot” actually is the explanation on how the island received its name — only it was an Acadian and not a Mi'kmaq word or phrase that was misinterpreted.

As Dr. Watson Kirkconnell explains in his book on Kings County place names, the Acadian reference for the area that today we call Boot Island was L'Isle au Bout (the land at the end).

Boot Island is a minor example of how the Acadian and Mi'kmaq languages influenced some of our place names. That influence, especially in Nova Scotia, was recognised as far back as

1892. In that year, the Massachusetts Historical Society compiled a list of the Mi'kmaq names of places and rivers in Nova Scotia, giving that task to one Elizabeth Frame of Shubenacadie. The paper Frame produced can be found today at Queen's University in Kingston.

While it may not have been the original intent, the scope of Frame's paper went well beyond Nova Scotia. However,

Frame listed at least 50 names the Mi'kmaq had for rivers, lakes and places in Nova Scotia and that was only a token effort. Here in Kings County and Hants County, the Mi'kmaq had names for every major place, lake, river and headland, but these are, for the most part, completely forgotten.

There are a couple of exception, however. In Hants County the Mi'kmaq Pessyquid, as recorded by Frame, is still in use in Hants County as Pisiquid. According to Frame, the Mi'kmaq Pessyquid means a river flowing squarely into the sea. Today we know the river by the Planter name, the Avon.

Dr. Kirkconnell offers up two spellings for Pessyquid — Pisiquid and Pigiquit, indicating it is an early Mi'kmaq name for Windsor. In his book on the expulsion, John Mack Farragher uses the spelling Pisiquid, referring to it as a place name for an Acadian settlement, and he doesn't refer to it as the name of a river.

Eaton's Kings County history, which included much of the early history of Hants County, uses Piziquid as the spelling of the Acadian settlement and the river. In his Windsor history, L. S. Loomer includes an illustration, dated 1753, of Fort