Say the names

I hardly need words to say that they carry meaning. Names, in particular, strike me as tiny ciphers of human history, syllables that, keenly listened to, tell much about how the past has marked us, and how we understand our now. In this part of the world, my mind and tongue constantly trip along the words of those for whom this place has always been home. This isn’t unique, of course, to northwestern Ontario: we are accustomed, in this country, to assuming custody over names that came long before their current designates. Our cities, parks and suburbs are swept through with original languages: Tadoussac and Mississauga, Ottawa and Saskatoon, Yoho and Penticton. But – in rendering stale such tantalising words – we are far less apt to remember their freshness, and taste again on our tongues the generous mingling of sound and story. Kakekeyash, Mishkegogamang. Achneepineskum and Neskantaga. Quequish, Ostamus – what do names really mean?

So many have been rendered ‘easy’, anglicised: Yellowhead, Big Trout, Summer Beaver, Roundsky, approximations and translations that eventually, through force of use and authority, find their way onto maps and family trees. Almost always, it seems, they are imposed over more intricate appellations. The change can disguise some fascinating shifts in perspective. A wise and charitable colleague, who’s lived here longer than he’s been alive, tells me that the common name Nauagessic is usually taken to mean ‘Bigsky’, or ‘Farsky’. A more accurate translation, however, encompassing the Ojibway understanding of the cosmos, would have to convey the sense that “you were standing at the far edge of the universe, and you were looking back, and you could see all the way across it.”

Others, come across in the rush through court lists and community circuits, are born directly from the awkwardness of colonial encounter. Yesno, for example, is a prominent family name in Eabametoong (aka Fort Hope). The patriarch, apparently, was an important spokesperson in the 1905 treaty-making process, but his English consisted of, you guessed it, two words. And I don’t know the story behind the Nothing family, but am willing to assume that it wasn’t their surname from time immemorial.

So it goes. The apparently permanent is infinitely malleable, and what you see, or say, isn’t necessarily what might have been. I’m reminded to slow down and resist mumbling and mangling the difficult names, stop skimming across those I think I know – we’re all poorer for it.