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Blue Nose, Redskins, Michif, Métis:

Good & Bad Names of Some Canadian Peoples

 

More than 50 percent of all the world’s tribal and national names contain a root that signifies ‘the people’. For example, Inuit and Innu mean ‘the people’. Dene, the correct name of the Athapaskan-speaking peoples, means ‘the men’ or ‘human beings’. When people of different races speaking different languages meet in history, there is territorial animosity, war, and rarely peaceful co-operation. There is also name-calling, mutual mangling of tribal names, and odd labels for newly encountered groups.

When the people our history calls Algonquin or Algonkin met their first whitemen along the St. Lawrence and in the Ottawa valley, Anishnabeg, the correct name for the Algonquins, were very startled by French priests with wooden crucifixes. So the Anishnabe word for the French is wa-mit-ig-oshe ‘men who wave wood over their heads’.

But white immigrants to North America were less kind in what they called the first peoples. The Hurons may have been given the name as an insult, from an Old French word for wild boar’s head or lout. Doukhobor ‘spirit-wrestler’ is a Russian equivalent of ‘holy-rollers’.

Eskimo is never used by the Inuit. It is derived from an Anishanabe insult that means ‘eaters of raw meat’, the insult implying they were so primitive they had not discovered the art of cooking meat. This misunderstanding would occur when an Anishnabe wandering north saw Inuit eating certain parts of fish and mammals raw but freshly killed.

On this morning of hope after the election of Barack Obama, optimists hope the human mixture might be a crisp salad of peoples, but realists know it as a racial dish that is not always palatable to bigots who sit down at the feast that isour world.

 

Blue Nose

There are as many derivations of blue nose as a term for a Nova Scotian as there are Nova Scotians. A maritime potato once had a blue nose. There are the blue noses of fishermen coming into harbour after the cold Atlantic winds have colored them. In the war of 1812, there was supposedly a Nova Scotia privateer with a cannon in her bow painted bright blue. She preyed on Yankee ships, and they called herThe Blue Nose. And now we have the famous symbol of Nova Scotia, the Blue Nose schooner, which has adorned the obverse of the Canadian dime since 1937. Over the years, many other supposititious origins have surfaced and sunk in the Bay of Improbability. Truth is, nobody truly knows this origin.

The Blue Nose schooner depicted on a 1928 Canadian stamp

Dene

Dene Nation is the new name (since 1978) for the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Terri- tories. Dene is the original name for the northern Athapaskan-speaking peoples of the Mackenzie River valley and the Barren Grounds. It means ‘the men’ or ‘the people’ or ‘human beings’. The Dene never called themselves Athapaskans. Southern enemies and now friendly neighbours, the Cree, called them Athapaska which means ‘strangers’ in Cree.

The Dene Nation has the political clout to negotiate with the federal government about land claims, and also sponsors programs to improve Dene health, education, and development of resources on Dene lands. Spokesperson-presidents of the Dene Nation have gained national prominence through television, for example, Mona Jacobs, Georges Erasmus, and Stephen Kakfwi. From the perspective of Canadian words and place names, the Dene consistently press for a return to the original names of Northwest Territory features. The Mackenzie River in one na-dene tongue is Deh-cho ‘big river’, an apt desciptive for the second-largest North American river system. Only the Mississippi is bigger. And Alexander Mackenzie did not discover the river.

 

Lake Erie Not “Spooky”

Lake Erie takes its label from a tribe of native Americans who once lived on the south shore of the lake. Their totem animal was the bobcat or puma. They wore its tail as a ceremonial head-dress. Erie means ‘long-tailed’ in their Iroquoian language. On the Niagara Peninsula and Niagara Escarpment of the north shore of Lake Erie in what became Canada dwelt roving bands of the so-called Neutral people. Early French explorers dubbed Erie Lac du Chat ‘Cat Lake.’

 

On a Parapet, in Lillooet, We Met

The village of Lillooet lies on the Fraser River at the feet of the mighty Cascade Mountains in B.C.’s southern interior. The town takes its name from the Lillooet people in whose Interior Salish language lillooet means ‘wild onions.’ The town was founded during the gold rush of 1850 when it served as a provisioning stop on the way to the Cariboo and Fraser River goldfields. The name became widely known across Canada in the 1950s and 60s when Margaret “Ma” Murray was the feisty editor of the Bridge River-Lillooet News and her editorials were quoted on the national wire services and on television & radio.

fly fishing on the Lillooet River, British Columbia, Canada

 

Métis

At first Métis meant a person of mixed parentage, usually Aboriginal and French. When first applied, Métis was scornful and dismissive. It’s a continental French word for mongrel or half- breed, arising from Old French mestis, in turn derived from Latin mixtus. In the street Latin of the Roman soldiers who conquered ancient Gaul, a mixtus was usually the child of a Roman father and a Gallic native. The same Latin root found its way into Spanish as mestizo, which also means a person of mixed blood. Métis is now a term of pride and identity in Canada.

 

Michif

Michif is a creole or dialect of Cree with French and Ojibwa words added, spoken by a few Métis in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. J. S. H. Brown in The Canadian Encyclopedia gives a sample sentence:

“Li pwesoon nimiyaymow” = ‘I like fish’.

Li = Cree ‘I’

nimiyaymow = Cree ‘like’

pwesoon = poisson, French ‘fish’

Most Métis speak French or English, and know Cree only if they have needed to speak it in their particular community.

 

Nishga'a

The Nishga'a or Nisga’a people still occupy their ancestral lands in the valley of the Nass River in northwestern British Columbia. Nass means ‘abundance’ or ‘food depot’ in their language which is called Nass-Gitksan, a member of the larger Tsimshian language family. Nisga’a means ‘people of the Nass.’

The food depot is the river itself, which every March churns in the run of oolichan fish, so abundant that they bring seabirds, seals, sea lions, and other animals to the mouth of the Nass River and sometimes right up the river. The oolichan is perhaps Canada's only fish that is ignitable. In the Nass country, the oolichan or candlefish is so full of oil it can be lighted at one end and used as a candle. British Columbia pioneers did just that, having been taught to by local aboriginal peoples.

Boiling oolichan in a heated grease pot

in the Nass Valley to extract the fish oil

The Nishga carve cedar totem poles, traditionally lived in plank houses, hold potlatch ceremonies, and belong to maternal phratries or clan-like descent organizations.

 

Redskins?

The racist notion that all North American native peoples had red skin began in published reports concerning explorer John Cabot’s encounters in 1497 with the Beothuk tribes on the island that was later called Newfoundland. The Beothuks, victims of systematic genocide by whites and other native peoples, were extinct by the late 18th century. Beothuks ornamented their skin with red ochre, perhaps a cinnabar pigment like vermilion, for ceremonial and spiritual purposes, hence appearing red-skinned to Cabot and his men.

A common error about Cabot, the man who named Canada, is that he was French. Cabot was born Giovanni Caboto in Genoa, Italy. Seeking financial backing for a voyage to find a western sea route to Asia, Caboto finally found it among merchants in Bristol, England. Before sailing, he became a naturalized British subject and Englished his name.

 

So there is a story behind every name with which we dub a group of people. Some names partake of glory; others are best abandoned to the barren fields of our past.

 

© 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

 

 

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