Active History

Matthew Dance

This post is part of a series. See the other entries here.

As a structure and not an event, settler colonialism is often accomplished through seemingly banal acts. Through bureaucracy and the establishment and implementation of policy and process, settler colonialism can deeply impact a place, small decision by small decision, gradually over time. Naming, or renaming, a street, neighbourhood, or town is such an act.

Previous writing in Active History, such as Sean Graham’s Changing Place Names, reminds us that most place names in Canada were imposed under colonialism and the processes to rename places today often raise questions of whose history is being acknowledged, whose erased, and how communities reckon with those legacies. Equally, Thomas Peace’s What’s in a Place Name: Adelaide Hoodless and Mona Parsons uses the stories of individuals to show that the naming schools and parks after people sends messages about whose contributions are seen as worthy of public remembrance.

As a geographer, I’ve long been fascinated by how people understand their environments. After completing my B.A., I spent several years working as a field technician across northern Canada. One summer in the early 1990s, while on Devon Island, I heard Inuktitut on the radio during our daily check-ins. Only then did I begin to grasp that people had lived and thrived there long before settlers arrived — a realization that set me on a long, sometimes uneven journey toward learning the missing geographies absent from my 1980s education.

Decades later, during my M.A., I discovered that Edmonton lacked a place-name dataset, so I created one based on Naming Edmonton: From Ada to Zoie. Working with the data revealed how few Indigenous names existed and how most commemorations honoured European men. Women, people of colour, and Indigenous peoples were largely excluded. Curious about how naming might become more inclusive, and eager to build a more comprehensive dataset, I joined the City of Edmonton’s Naming Committee to explore what a more representative process could look like.