“A lot of [the name changes] are very dependent on getting feedback from people who live in the area, and great care is taken by the provinces and territories to engage with local residents to ask the questions: Does the naming make sense? Is it valid? Is it offensive or controversial in any way?” says Westley.

A few years ago, the board published an interactive map showing about a century’s worth of renamings, categorized by reason: societal or administrative factors, environmental factors, removal of derogatory terms and, in particular, the restoration of Indigenous place names.

The visual presentation supplements the board’s meticulous guidelines, a 41-page document that lays out all the various parameters for toponyms, among them: conforming with statutory naming rules (i.e., for places established by legislation, like a municipality or a reserve), identifying the geographical extent of a named place, the use of personal names (which, these days, boils down to: avoid them), adhering to detailed spelling and usage protocols, and following procedures for how to deal with pejorative names. In fact, the interactive map identifies numerous places that once included a previously common but now widely condemned term for an Indigenous woman.       

The abandonment of Indigenous place names was part and parcel of Eurocentric colonialism. A growing number of geographical places, as well as First Nations reserves, have been renamed in recent years, drawing on local languages and historically acknowledged monikers. In fact, Vancouver lawyer Christina Gray, a Ts’msyen citizen from Lax Kw’alaams in northern B.C. and a Łutsël K’é Dene from the Northwest Territories, co-authored a report earlier this year on the “rematriation” of Indigenous place names for the Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University.

One of the conclusions of the paper is that this ongoing renaming process “enables an appreciation for the deeply legal and political implications of deciding to reawaken Indigenous languages on Indigenous lands.” Rematriation, it continues, “inscribes practices of recovery and return to the relationships between Indigenous lands, laws, governance, values, and cultures.”    

These efforts also recover important stories and mythologies. Gray recalls growing up in an East Vancouver home, where her bedroom windows opened up onto a magnificent view of the North Shore mountains. “I always looked at the mountains and thought, ‘Oh, they’re so beautiful!’” But when she was about 12 or 13, an aunt from Squamish First Nation told her a story about the two sisters of the North Shore mountains, a traditional name that is quite different than “the Lions,” as they’ve been known in B.C. for years.

The Squamish name refers to the tale of how two sisters reconciled a pair of rival clans over a potlatch. “I started to think about how we conceive of places based on the stories that are embedded in their histories,” says Gray. Notably, such evocative imagery can also be found at the root of the word Ontario, an Iroquois term for sparkling water that began to appear on European maps as early as 1641.