[LINK] "Canada should replace colonial place names with Indigenous ones"

[rfmcdonald]

The sentiments expressed in Tim Wood's Toronto Star opinion piece are ones I broadly agree with.

[Indigenous place names] have contextual meaning and resonance. They inspire and they evoke. Their supplanting by the mundane toponymy of 19th-century European explorers and royals is, at best, arrogant and insensitive. At worst, such place names are part and parcel of the historical “policy to eliminate Aboriginal people as distinct peoples,” as impugned by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Toponymy was not an explicit focus of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, although its report does call for adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Article 13 of that declaration enshrines the right of Indigenous peoples “to designate and retain their own names for communities [and] places.”

Place names have contributed to past efforts at reconciliation with Aboriginals in Canada and beyond (to say nothing of forging distinctive, post-colonial national identities more generally). The Queen Charlotte Islands were renamed Haida Gwaii under British Columbia’s 2010 Haida Gwaii Reconciliation Act, while Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island National Park officially became Quttinirpaaq National Park in 1999. The famous red outcropping in Australia’s Outback, previously known as Ayers Rock National Park, was formally designated Uluru National Park in 1995.