Mount Douglas or Pkols? Why not both? Members of the Saanich Tribes want the well-known peak, named in the mid-19th century after Vancouver Island’s second governor, to be known as Pkols (pronounced p’cawls). Tsawout elder Eric Pelkey says that’s the name, meaning white rock, his people gave the small mountain, which they regard as representing the beginning of time for the Coast Salish people.
Members of the tribes plan to march up Mount Douglas and symbolically restore its original name. Some might think that a presumptuous move, but the symbolic gesture is no more presumptuous than when the peak was named after James Douglas, the Hudson’s Bay Co. factor who served as the governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island during its formative years.
The ceremony on May 22 will include a re-enactment of the signing of a treaty between the Saanich people and Douglas, as well as a telling of the creation story associated with the site.
The Saanich Tribes have contacted the provincial and Saanich municipal governments about changing the name officially. Whether that effort succeeds remains to be seen, but the name change doesn’t have to be official. Why not use both names?
The peak represents the era in which the histories of the original people and the newcomers began to intertwine. We shouldn’t try to subdivide history, setting aside one part of it for this group, and another for that group. It’s a shared history all Vancouver Islanders should celebrate and seek to understand in its entirety, warts and all.
Some geographical features are named for obvious reasons — Lone Tree Hill and Broken Islands, for example — but other names go far beyond mere identification. They carry with them cultural and political meanings.
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of cartography is toponymy, the assigning of names to places and features, says Saanich cartographer and map aficionado Michael Layland.
“People tend to regard the authority to grant names as equivalent to ownership,” he said. “The Spanish gave Spanish names to everything, the English gave English names to everything.”
He said the names of one era of dominance can be overwritten or dismissed by the succeeding group. The issue is complicated, he said, when different groups with overlapping territories give different names to the same feature, not an uncommon situation on the Island.
There is no doubt that many Island place names reflect the dominance that was imposed with colonialism. They symbolize a certain amount of displacement of one people by another. Erasing the newer names won’t erase undesirable events in history, but bringing back some of the old names can acknowledge that Vancouver Island didn’t just suddenly spring into existence with the arrival of European explorers.
The names on and around the Island reflect rich layers of history, from the 18th-century Spanish to the 19th-century British to 20th-century war heroes, added to the rich profusion of names that owe their origin to the thousands of years of occupation by the First Nations: Carmanah, Nanaimo, Cowichan, Saanich, Chemainus, Tahsis, Sooke, Ucluelet, Esquimalt, Metchosin. Layland calls it “a compatible patchwork of names.”
It would be impractical and confusing to change thousands of place names on the maps of B.C., but why not a sign on Mount Douglas stating it is also known as Pkols?
That would add depth and texture to the understanding of our shared history.
