Elders weigh in on street names

DENISE RIDEOUT

As city council continues to work on naming Iqaluit’s nameless streets, some of the community’s elders say many of those roads already have Inuktitut names that go back to the first settling of Iqaluit.

There’s Federal Road, for example, which longtime Inuit residents call “qaqqaliariaq,” or “the route that leads to the hills.”

The Road to Nowhere, which houses the new subdivision, is known to Inuit as “tasiluqiaqiaq,” or “the road to Crazy Lake.”

Older Inuit also have traditional names for different sections of town, including West 40, Sylvia Grinnell Park and the beach area.

And they would like to see some of these traditional names on Iqaluit’s new street signs.

“They may not be legal, but you should do some more research on the traditional names,” elder Okee Kunuk said at a public meeting last week about the city’s street-naming project.

City councillor Simon Nattaq agreed the old place names should be honoured. “I know we won’t forget the traditional names or the names that have already been established,” he said in Inuktitut.

Over the past four years, city council has been working to name roads in Iqaluit — the only capital city in Canada whose streets are nameless. Through a series of public meetings, council has asked residents to suggest names, which will appear on street signs in Inuktitut and English.

Residents have suggested names ranging from Inuit clothing to tools to traditional foods, such as dried fish and bannock. And city council has already printed a new map of Iqaluit with the proposed street names on it.

But some Iqaluit residents want that revised to include the old Inuktitut street names.

At a meeting at the elders’ centre on July 4, Inuit elders gathered around maps of the City of Iqaluit and shouted out the traditional names for areas around town.

Sitting in the sunny room drinking tea and eating doughnuts, the elders, speaking in Inuktitut, talked about their old names for places.

They suggested the road leading to the Coast Guard building on the beach be named “Niuraiuk,” which means “where the boats unload.” They want the street to Sylvia Grinnell River called “Iqaluit” — “the place of many fish” — because that’s the area the original settlers referred to as Iqaluit.

Elders also said naming the long strip between Apex and Iqaluit “Apex Road” isn’t traditional because Apex is the English name for that easterly section of town. Instead, elders want the road called “Niaqunnguusiaq,” which uses the Inuktitut name — Niaqunnguu — for Apex.

But, in looking at the map, the elders did have some good things to say about the proposed street names. They even found a few of them quite appropriate.

Two streets in the Road to Nowhere subdivision, for example, got a few chuckles. The suggested names are “Anuri,” which is Inuktitut for wind, and “Aput,” which means snow.

“It’s windy there and they get a lot of snow,” said Leesee Kelly, with a smile on her face.

Staff at Iqaluit city hall will now try to incorporate some of the elders’ suggestions into the proposed street names. “We tried to put all the names in Inuktitut and respect the culture and history of Inuit life,” said Cheri Kemp-Kinnear, who has been working on the project for two years.

Naming Iqaluit’s roads has been a long path for council and city staff. It has sparked debate and incited some Inuit residents to petition against some of the proposed names.

Residents were particularly bothered that streets in Happy Valley would honour Europeans who explored the Arctic, such as Robert Peary and John Franklin. They didn’t like the idea of praising white men who came to the North and treated Inuit poorly.

Council has since agreed to drop the explorers’ names and will now name streets after Nunavut pioneers, such as Helen Magsagak and Jack Anawak.

In May, several Iqaluit citizens, including Lena Ellsworth and Elisapee Davidee, spoke out against the Inuktitut street names, saying they were too simplistic. They guessed council wanted to give roads names such as “Tuktu Street” and “Ulu Lane” because they would be easy for non-Inuit to pronounce.

Ellsworth, who spearheaded a petition in May asking council to rethink some of the street names, echoed her concerns at last week’s public meeting.

“When I first saw these names, I thought they were elementary, like baby talk,” she said.

“I guess my first thought was that this was another process of assimilation.”

City council will vote on a revised list of possible street names at its July 23 meeting.