The Naming of a Nation – um, of a Country

We have a tendency to think that Canada began in 1867, and while the creation of our parliamentary democracy set the template for the most successful form of government in the world, according to any Canadian you talk to, Canada had a history dating back well over three centuries even then and its large territory was covered by hundreds of Nations.

At the time of Confederation, Canada was only one of many names proposed for the new country. The word existed but referred to only the two old colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, or Canada-West and Canada-East, as they were then called, not to the four colonies that initially formed our country. Names proposed included Acadia, the name associated with the French settlements in the Maritimes; Tupona, for The United Provinces of North America; Efisga, for English, French, Irish, Scots, German and Aboriginal lands; Borealia to evoke the North; Hochelaga, the name of the original Iroquoian Nation, on Montreal Island; and Laurentia from the then recently named mountains. During the debate in the Legislative Assembly on February 9, 1865, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation, said, “I read in one newspaper not less than a dozen attempts to derive a new name. One individual chooses Tuponia and another, Hochelaga as a suitable name for the new nationality. Now I ask any honourable member of this house how he would feel if he woke up some fine morning and found himself instead of a Canadian, a Tuponian or a Hochelagander.” There were surely lobbyists for each different name, and had they had television in the 1860s, it would likely have become the most important single issue that the politicians had to deal with. We might have ended up with a much simpler name such as Britannica or Albertoria (for the Prince Regent), which were also proposed. The origin of the name Canada had been a subject of debate for years before Confederation and many European influences were considered the source. One story credits the Portuguese. It suggests that they were among the earliest Europeans to see our coast, and they dismissed it with the words Aca Nada, or nothing here. In P.G. Roy’s 1906 publication Les Noms Geographiques de la prov. de Québec, he lists arguments that credit the Portuguese and the Spanish, who used the word “canada” for road. The French and Danish, he reports, could have a claim because of a military encampment that once belonged to Caesar in the lower Seine valley called Bas-de-Canada. The name had been shortened from Castra Danorum (camp of the Danes).

The Germans also had a claim because of a French translation of a German study of reed-filled flatlands in the Amazon they called Canadas. This argument involved Spanish as well, because the Spanish word for reed is canna and if ada is added to it, the new word means clearing. It is hard to see how this applies to our country, but then Roy was only reporting all the different explanations. Narrowing it down, he concluded that despite the similarities to words in other European languages, the most likely sources were either the Nations of the Cree and Montagnais (Innu), or the Iroquoian Nations of the St. Lawrence. That is where the controversy really started. The French under Champlain had allied themselves originally with the Montagnais and Algonquin Nations, but in the 1530s, almost a century earlier, Jacques Cartier had met what appeared to be a different people on the shores of the St. Lawrence. They were an Iroquoian Nation and were subsequently displaced, perhaps as a result of diseases brought on by their interaction with Cartier. He took their name for a village, Canada, or Kanata, and applied it to the countryside along the shore of the St. Lawrence River below Stadaconé, or present-day Quebec City. The argument as to whether Canada comes from there or from the Montagnais language has been going on since the colony was first created, and depending upon who is right, the word Canada could mean quite different things. According to Father Albert Lacombe, writing in 1874, if the Montagnais were the people who gave us the name Canada, it came from their word for foreigner – someone coming from afar: Kannatats. It is possible that the early settlers accepted the name they were called as a way of having an identity to the Montagnais, who were the majority at the time. Over time, the argument goes, they became Canadiens, or more probably Canayans. Certainly, the Montagnais and Algonquin were the ones they interacted with the most. If this is in fact the origin of the name Canada, it seems appropriate. After all, we have been told many times that we are a nation of immigrants. Wouldn’t it be fitting if the name of our country actually means ‘foreigner’? But do we want to celebrate a name that excludes those residents who coined it? Most of the arguments and records of names were presented by clergy, and in 1857 Monsignor Laflèche wrote that the name came from the word “P’Konata” used both by the Cree and the Montagnais. The expression means ‘without a plan’ and seems to have been the verbal equivalent of a shrug, perhaps reflecting Laflèche’s opinion of the government of the time. He said if you were to ask a Cree what he wants, and he had no ready response, he might say “P’Konata.” Today, if you ask a Canadian what he wants, his equivalent answer would be, “I dunno!” or “Je l’sais-tu?” Mgr. Laflèche’s interpretation contributed to the risk that Thomas D’Arcy McGee might wake up one morning as a Hochelagander. Thankfully for our self-image, P.G. Roy in 1906 argued persuasively that the name Canada had come from the Iroquois. He presented pages of arguments from Father J.A. Cuoq who, back at the time of Confederation, was the authority on that Iroquoian dialect. Cuoq sets out his proof that, based upon the words that Cartier recorded at Stadaconé and Hochelaga, he met the Laurentian Iroquoians, not the Montagnais. This turns out to have been fortunate, because in an Iroquoian language, Canada means village, or agglomeration of tents, though it could have been a verb suggesting the animation of such an agglomeration. In any case, it was a more dignified meaning than a shrug or a foreigner, even if one of the other contenders had a more convincing argument. Cartier, according to Cuoq, took the word to be the name of the place itself, and so it became.

Stadaconé, or Quebec City, beyond the western extreme of Cartier’s Canada, was peopled with Montagnais when Champlain arrived some seven decades after Cartier. Stadeconé in Algonquian means “wing” and a similar word in Montagnais means “place where one crosses on pieces of wood as on a bridge.” While Stadaconé was located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, a map credited to Champlain from 1613 shows the word “Québec” at the edge of the river on the south shore. This is not surprising because the word meant narrowing, obstructed, or blocked, indicating the place where the river narrows, as is the case at the location of Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River. It had the same meaning in Algonquin, Cree and Mi’kmaq, and while Champlain also spelled it Québecq, other early French explorers spelled it Kébek, Kébec, Képak, Kebbek, and other variations. It can be thought of as onomatopoeic, or a word that evokes a sound, if one thinks of the echo that would rebound in a narrow passage, and it is likely that the word existed to describe such narrow places before it was applied to ‘the quebec’ on the river. As with the word Canada, historians invoke many arguments over its origins. Some suggest that it could have been influenced by the Norman rule of adding the suffix ‘bec’ to indicate a promontory at the junction of two rivers, even though the Algonquin word Kebh means ‘blocked’ and the suffix ‘ek’ means ‘here.’ The names Canada and Quebec, existing since before the first Europeans arrived in the Americas, come from two different peoples – the Iroquoian and Algonquian – who fought as much as they shared, and pushed each other back and forth along their frontiers. Even after contact with the Europeans, one group allied itself with the English, while the other went with the French. Today that duality is commemorated in our two levels of government who often seem to fight more than they share. Thanks to Cartier, the territory entered via the St. Lawrence became known as Canada, but New France was not Canada. It was simply located in a frontier named Canada, a word that was synonymous with all of the territory accessed through the St. Lawrence River. Quebec, the name for the place, replaced Stadaconé, the name of the village. In Champlain’s map of 1613, the south shore of the St. Lawrence is called Nouvelle France and the north shore is called Nouvelle Biscaye. Neither region is called either Quebec or Canada. Champlain dealt with the Algonquin and Montagnais. What happened to the Iroquoian peoples at Stadaconé and Hochelaga that Cartier met seven decades earlier is a matter of speculation, but Champlain would have had little reason to call a specific part of the colony Canada. The Montagnais, using the word Kannatats to describe foreigners, may have given rise to the first French colonists calling themselves Canayens, a word considered a colloquial form of Canadiens. Perhaps the word Canayens commemorates a different naming from that of the territory Cartier identified as Canada (or Kanata). In such a case, the word Canayens descends from the Montagnais, while the word Canadian comes from the Iroquoian.

The French created the Diocese of Quebec to administer New France in 1674. In 1763, when the French colony became a British one, the British proclaimed the Government of the Province of Quebec, not of Canada. Canada replaced Quebec only in 1791, 28 years after that proclamation, when the colony was divided into Upper and Lower Canada, both parts of the territory accessed through the St. Lawrence River. Until then, Canada had been a European colloquial name for our part of the New World, but its European-descended residents described themselves as Canadiens, Canayens, or Canadians, something like ‘foreigners’ in the Montagnais language, but later, in 1840, the two colonies were reunited as the colony of Canada until they became the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario at Confederation, and its citizens became Canadians, or Canadien(ne)s. It was not until the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s that the Canadiens, or Canayens, called themselves Québécois and their place the Quebec Nation. They took a decision, but most of us are still unsure who we are, believing it befits us for being a part of the best agglomeration of nations in the world.