Geographical place names in B.C. honour colonizers, but Indigenous names returning

People from all over the world come to British Columbia to hike its many forested trails and take pictures of its towering mountains and bright blue lakes.

When they check their maps, those names are often in English, the language of British Columbia's colonial settlers.

That got Jared Qwustenuxun Williams wondering whether First Nation — Quw'utsun, in the Cowichan Valley, a region just north of Victoria on Vancouver Island — had different names for prominent places that aren't used today.

"When you look at the lakes or the hills or everything, you only see colonial names," Williams said. "It's really a disconnecting." 

Williams uses his YouTube and social media channels to teach the Hul'q'umi'num names of geographical places around the valley, such as  Swuq'us, which is known as Mount Prevost, near Duncan. It's named after a British settler James Charles Prevost.

Williams says the mountain was named by one of Quw'utsun's first ancestors, Stutsun, who was dropped there by the creator. 

As Williams tells the story, Stutsun was very lonely and asked the creator for a friend. That's when he found a dog in a cave on the mountain. The dog had a condition that made it walk with its nose pointing to the sky. 

Stutsun named the dog Swuq'us, after the condition, and when the dog died, he buried it at the top of the mountain. 

Knowing the traditional name for Swuq'us says a lot about the relationship between the place, its people and history, Williams says.

"Everything here has a name, and each one of them has a history that really connects us to the land," Williams said. 

Williams highlights popular locations in his videos, often consulting with elders who might remember their Indigenous names.

"Only recently has the world wanted to hear this, and so there's not a lot of existing resources," Williams said.  

Acknowledging Indigenous place names confronts the colonial history that replaced them, Williams says.  "Once we can overcome that, I think it'll be easy to get all these names returned."  

Naming geographical places, such as mountains and lakes, became formalized in 1879 with the creation of the Geographic Board of Canada — now called the the Geographical Names Board of Canada.