A Saskatoon history buff questions whether the names we apply in Saskatchewan do a good job of reflecting our shared history and reconciliation.
On Sept. 1, a small an unremarkable piece of riverfront land in Saskatoon’s northeast was renamed the Ellen Remai Natural Area. Ellen Remai is donating 78.22 acres to the city.
This land will become part of the corridor for Saskatoon’s proposed national urban park. Although not a well-known area of Saskatoon outside of the nature-loving and trail-biking communities, this renaming is a repeat of Meewasin’s renaming of the former Maryville Nunnery to the Peggy McKercher Conservation Site in 2009 and the Northeast Swale years earlier.
These renamings raise questions about who gets to name sites in our city, sites that often hold fragments of our collective history. These renamings call into question our collective attention to reconciliation.
In light of these efforts, the curious citizen must ask: Does this name symbolize the Saskatoon of the future? Does it ensure that our history is not forgotten? And what does this name mean for reconciliation?
Advocates for the renaming cited the harm generations of Indigenous peoples had suffered under residential schools implemented by Macdonald’s government. Similar arguments exist for the renaming of McKercher Drive in Saskatoon and Dewdney Avenue in Regina.
The renaming of streets highlights the tension between remembering and forgetting, between past and present.
No one claims the Ellen Remai Natural Area or the Peggy McKercher Conservation Site or the Northeast Swale because no one lives there anymore. Although loaded with intangible cultural history, these places have become untethered except to the people who recreate there.
No longer farmland nor named for the families that poured their lives into the land; these places still matter. Sites like these are places where individual memory and collective history collide.
Batoche stands as a prime example of such a site, a place where Métis families can remember together and as a society we can learn and question history. Saskatoon has so few of these sites that it must be asked: do these renamings advance reconciliation and represent the city we collectively envision?
Will future school children be bussed to Peggy McKercher Conservation Site and assume she had ever set foot on that piece of land? How will they understand their connection to this place named after someone with no connection to this place?
How will those future generations know to ask about the history here without a name that represents the past to search for? When Saskatoon sprawls north, who will ask about the settler-era lime kilns that lie buried at the Ellen Remai Natural Area? Or the prehistoric fossils recovered from the Riddell Paleontological site?
Or those who farmed for decades the land now renamed the Meewasin Northeast Swale? If we are so intent on forgetting, what hope is there someone will ask about the Indigenous and Métis people that claim this treaty territory and how they are represented here?
Renaming sites without asking whose history they reflect or obscure ignores our shared obligation to one another. Let’s ensure our city’s names reflect our shared vision for this land.
Carmen Gilmore is an avid history buff and an award-winning creator of a local heritage walk.
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