Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 11

There oughta be a law against some of the place names that we get stuck with to satisfy the vainglorious whims of land developers. For instance, I live on a road called Rondeview. It was named in the sixties by a developer named Ron, and I guess it was his idea of clever pun. I curse him every time I have to tell a caller, “No, not Rendezvous. R-o-n-d-e-v-i-e-w.” Someday when I have time I plan to get up a petition to change it to something less embarrassing. My preference would be Whisky Slough Road because I’ve always admired that flavourful home-brewed place name for the bay down front. Or another time-honoured name for this area, Hardscratch. But I reckon either would be a hard sell with the present-day landowners. Probably Valueview or Investmentcrest would go over better. Anything but R-o-n-d-e-v-i-e-w.

Sunshine Coast place names have always been a bit of a fraud. Except for the original ones, of course, like Sechelt, Sakinaw and Tuwanek, but few of those made it onto official maps. When the first European explorers reached the Sunshine Coast, every nook and cranny had been named by the folks who’d spent several thousand years getting to know the place, the Squamish and Sechelt. Gibsons was Chekwelp, Wilson Creek was Tsawcome and Pender Harbour, kalpilin, but that meant nothing to the visitors. Officers of the British and Spanish navies, they took it as their right and duty to immediately set about renaming the place with words from their own lexicons. It was a prodigious task and setting aside the bald-faced effrontery of it, you have to give these poorly educated mariners credit for the sheer volume of monikers they were able to spew up on short notice.

The first one through the Inside Passage was Captain Vancouver, and he had it fairly easy since he got to name the major features after major figures—the Gulf of Georgia after King George, Howe Sound and Nelson Island after great naval heroes, etc., although by the time he had reached the top end of the Sunshine Coast he was getting sufficiently befuddled he saddled one of the most charming locales on the coast with the lugubrious name of Desolation Sound. It is speculated his gout was acting up on that day.

Later Royal Navy surveyors charged with the finicky business of naming each tiny islet and cove soon ran out of shipmates, wives, sisters, mistresses and pets to commemorate. Captain Richards, who did detailed charting of the Sunshine Coast in 1860, stooped to borrowing names from the racetrack. He was a betting man apparently, and just as he was passing Halfmoon Bay he received a dispatch from Old Blighty containing good news about his wager on that year’s Epsom Derby. In his euphoria, he named every feature he sighted that day after some aspect of the 1860 Epsom Derby, including Merry Island, Buccaneer Bay, Tattenham Ledge, Welcome Pass, Oaks Point, Surrey Islands, Epsom Point, Derby Point and, not least, Thormanby Islands after the winning steed. Richards must have had a sense of humour. One of the popular canards about Nelson was that when his higher-ups signalled him to retreat during the Battle of Copenhagen, Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye and said, “I don’t see a thing,” and fought on to glorious victory. When it fell to Richards to name the large bay entered by a narrow pass on the west side of Nelson Island, he chose “Blind Bay” and “Telescope Passage.”

It no more deterred him than it did Rondeview Ron that there were other, less frivolous names well established in local usage that would have served better. Perhaps it’s time we took our revenge on some of these name-giving chauvinists by engaging in some judicious revisionism. There has been surprisingly little of this, given the current rage for reconciliation with First Nations. The Haida managed to get the former Queen Charlotte Islands formally renamed Haida Gwaii, and there has been a fairly successful effort to establish “Salish Sea” as a new name for the integrated system of waters comprising Juan de Fuca Strait, Puget Sound and Georgia Strait.

The funny thing about that name “Salish Sea,” which many well-intended non-Aboriginals now apply to every bay and backwater on the south coast, is that it was never intended to replace existing names, only to be used when collectively invoking the whole of Juan de Fuca Strait, Puget Sound, Georgia Strait and all associated waters in the lee of Vancouver Island. Also it seems the renamers forgot to consult coastal First Nations on whether or not they would consider “Salish” an entirely appropriate handle for their great inland sea, which it is not. The name “Salish” or Séliš originated far from the ocean in the parched badlands of Montana, where it was the chosen name of the Indigenous nation American authorities in their wisdom renamed “Flatheads.” These folks lived in quiggly holes rather than longhouses and preferred the taste of fresh buffalo to salmon. “Salish” only came to be applied to the peoples of the coast when non-Indigenous scholars in distant ivory towers decided that the several dozen First Nations occupying the south coast and interior of BC as well as Montana, Idaho and Washington State all belonged to the same Salishan linguistic family, an obscure academic concept on par with saying that Spanish, French and Italian are all part of the Romance linguistic family. Being linked at all was news to the nations involved, who thought of themselves as proudly distinct. I well remember the Sechelt elder Clarence Joe raging against being lumped together with the Kw'amutsun, who he considered to be traditional enemies. Using “Salish” when one means Sechelt, Okanagan or Lummi is like using “Romanic” when one means Brazilian, Mauritian or Walloon. Better to be a bit more specific.

Mostly, restoration of Indigenous names has been limited to eliminating blatantly racist examples like “Squaw Lake,” although one of the most prominent offenders, the famous Vancouver photo spot called “Siwash Rock,” remains curiously untouched. Officialdom seems more committed to an indirect campaign of displaying Indigenous place names on road signs in smaller print below the newcomer names, no doubt hoping the originals might catch on. Alas, any chance of this happening is defeated by the practice of spelling Indigenous names using a scholarly spelling system that employs backward question marks, numerals, pointy brackets, Greek letters and other mystifying hieroglyphics such that “Squamish” becomes “SḵwX̱wú7mesh.” This is not an Indigenous way of writing. It is a scholarly writing system called Americanist notation or NAPA. There is nothing particularly Salish about it. I have seen it used in the UK to translate their road signs into unintelligible versions of Gaelic and Welsh. I have never understood how language revivalists hope to bring dying tongues back into popular usage by spelling them in an alphabet that can only be deciphered by those with a degree in linguistics. The Sechelt people, or at least the pointy-headed white guy who originally helped them document their language, devised a special alphabet that mostly avoided upside-down question marks, although it doesn’t subscribe to the notion of capitalization. Thus “Sechelt” becomes “shíshálh.” I am sure there is a very good argument in support of this grammatical oddity, but I don’t know what it is. Neither, I suspect, do most of the shíshálh people.

kalpilin is what the shíshálh people called my hometown and they called it that for hundreds if not thousands of years. It has only been called Pender Harbour since Captain Richards overnighted here in 1860 and named it after his Royal Navy buddy Dan Pender. I would be willing to give up Pender Harbour for kalpilin any time. I wonder how Gibsonians like the sound of Chekwelp?

Since publishing an earlier version of this diatribe, the shíshálh have called my bluff by formally proposing to change the name of my home neighbourhood, Madeira Park, to salalus. Actually I would be sorry to lose the pretty Madeira name, which honours the founder of modern Pender Harbour, but I would be happy to offer a trade for Rondeview!