You Cannot Rename Away Our History
On August 27, the President of the United States signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario. It directs the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to change the name across American federal use within thirty days. It has no force in Canada… but wasn’t it intriguing to see how, due to Canadian companies using US vendors, that the name change showed up on maps shared by Hydro One, LCBO, and a Government of Canada agency to name a few. Oops.
Canadians responded. As we would expect.
But what fascinated me was the argument we reached for.
The Prime Minister answered by pointing to the name's Indigenous root, Ontari'io, and noting that it is more than four hundred years old, older than Confederation and older than the Declaration of Independence. Premiers said versions of the same thing. So did columnists, and so did a great many of us on social media.
We defended a settler country's sovereignty by holding up an Indigenous word as proof of prior claim.
I started to wonder to myself… likely because I was in the thick of writing and researching these posts for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation… what we are doing when we reach for a language we do not speak, on behalf of a country that has spent four centuries attempting to erase it. And, just saying, the fact that the Europeans decided to put the name on maps in the mid 1600s doesn’t exactly mean that the name has only been around for 400 years.
So I went on a bit of a deep dive… and I’m inviting you to come along with me.
I hear you saying… who am I - a settler - to be writing about whose word this is?! It is a good question to ask… and that is the reason that I dug deep and made sure that the voices that are centred here are Indigenous ones.
Let’s dive in… respectfully, the Prime Minister said the word is a Wendat one.
The Chiefs of Ontario say it’s Mohawk… or at least they did when the FIFA World Cup was coming to Tkaronto and Kaná:ta.
An Indigenous scholar from Syracuse University says it is “sufficient to say it’s an Indigenous Iroquoian word.
The Government of Ontario’s own website says it comes from an Iroquois word “kanadario,” meaning “sparkling” water.
What we can take away from this is that the Indigenous sources disagree but do so respectfully as over their long histories they have called the lake by various names not relying on Google Maps to label it. What is interesting to observe is that settler governments and officials have picked one and gone with it!
Writers Hugh Burnam (Mohawk Nation) and Emily Porter (Cayuga Nation) highlight the diversity of the naming of the lake as a part of its rich story. Known by some peoples as “sparkling water,” others as “great lake,” and yet others by“leading sea” they acknowledge that the “lake has never belonged solely to a single nation.”
They end with an invitation to work together as good neighbours - United States, Canada, and Indigenous nations - to look after the lake’s history and the lake itself. And remind us that it is a shared resource connecting and sustaining many activities, fish and wildlife, not to mention providing drinking water to around nine million people.
The nation often named around Knox College and many places across Southern Ontario in acknowledgements has spoken as well - giving the title for this piece… Chief Margaret Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation gave her response before the order was even signed. The lake has been here for thousands of years, she said, long before either of these countries existed. For her nation it is not a lake on a map. It is homeland, and it is history.
You can change a label on a map, she said, but you cannot change the relationship her people have with these lands and waters. "You cannot rename away our history."
She went further than defending a name. Her hope, she said, was that the moment might push people past the political rhetoric to learn whose lands and waters these have always been.
As I learned in my work on A Harder Acknowledgement, the lands and waters where Knox College resides are indeed, by Treaty 14 known as the Head of the Lake agreement (1806), are connected to promises of fishing rights for the Mississaugas as well as a land claim of one mile of land on each side of the banks along the Credit River… that makes Mississauga, Oakville, and Burlington appear as “squatters.” You can read it for yourself on the Government of Canada’s Treaties site: Treaty 14. And if you think that they can’t possibly have a claim on this land, apparently they do - since both the Federal and Ontario Government settled one of their claims just this year in the amount of $183.4 million for past losses.
And a final word on treaties, in the spirit of Talk Treaty to Me, another President - this one of the Seneca Nation called on the US one to rescind his order because it violates the terms of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. “The President cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action,” J. Conrad Seneca said in a statement. Changing the name of Lake Ontario would have implications on the signed treaty which names it several times providing the lay out of the Seneca Nation’s boundaries. Treaties matter.
As people of faith, it is good to remind us that the first thing the human is given to do in the garden is name the animals, and it is worth noticing what kind of act that is. God brings them and then waits to see. The human names what he did not make. Naming in Eden is attention, not ownership.
Which is why renaming reads so differently everywhere else in Scripture. Pharaoh renames Joseph. Babylon renames Daniel and his friends… renaming is what EMPIRE does on its way to absorbing you, and anyone who has read the residential school record knows this. Children arrived with names and were given other ones… or in some cases, were reduced to just being a number.
What I so appreciate by listening to Indigenous voices on this “political theatre”… is what they are focusing on in all of this… they are talking about water… while many are talking about a label on a map!
And when a Premier is willing to devote energy and dollars to putting up a HUGE sign to ensure that everyone knows what the name of the lake is… while BIGGER issues are in play… the theatre turns to tragic comedy. Especially when you consider how many drinking advisories there are still active (many long term and some as much as 30 years) in the Province with the Indigenous Name!
The peoples who have lived longest with that water are asking whether anyone actually intends to care for the thing the label points at, and neither government in this fight is answering that effectively these days. But I would invite us to notice what we are doing when we take up Indigenous language as ammunition to win the argument, and then return to a country where the lack of basic infrastructure, access to adequate healthcare, housing, and education, and the level of violence and incarceration disproportionately impacts those who steward the mother tongue.
If we are going to say Ontari'io this autumn, it is worth asking what else we are prepared to say and take action on.
That is a question for our land acknowledgements. And it is a larger question for the year ahead as we reflect on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
p.s. If you want to keep up to date on Indigenous issues, I’d highly recommend searching for the Indigenous Nation websites near you. As I researched this post, I found several sites that offered meaningful engagement on the issues like ICT, which is an Indigenous-Led nonprofit newsroom based in Phoenix; Turtle Island News (Six Nations) and APTN National News provides continuing Canadian Indigenous coverage.