Words on the Street

In the fictional dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984, “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” In the real world, history is also a palimpsest, though it’s rarely scraped entirely clean. Nothing proves that more than our maps.

Beyond their utility, maps and the place names they contain are many things. They are testaments to geography (South Street, Lower Water Street), to architecture (Wall Street, Church Street), to nature (Oak Avenue, Steller’s Jay Place), to sports and culture (Northern Dancer Boulevard, Taylor Swift Way), and to patriotism (Confederation Drive, Avenida 9 de Julio). Perhaps most contentiously, at least in the current climate, they are also acknowledgements of lives lived (Dundas Street, Granville Street).

When a firmly established place name offends modern sensibilities, it can be difficult to scrub it completely from the maps we use to navigate and make sense of the world. Case in point: locations named after Edgar Dewdney, the nineteenth-century surveyor, bureaucrat, and member of Parliament.

In 1882, as lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories, Dewdney provoked a national scandal when he moved the future capital of Saskatchewan from Battleford to Wascana, where he happened to own quite a bit of land along the expected route of a railway. Long after the controversy subsided, his name would remain associated with an iconic trail in British Columbia (much of it now incorporated into the Crowsnest Highway), as well as a small park, a swimming pool, and a major road in the city that eventually became known as Regina.

Like numerous other Confederation-era figures, Dewdney has steadily fallen out of favour in recent years, especially for his role as Indian commissioner in the North-West Territories. He championed residential schools as superior to day schools, coerced First Nations into entering treaties by withholding government rations, and made promises to Indigenous leaders that Ottawa had no intention of keeping. Designated a national historic person in 1975, Dewdney was reappraised by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in 2023, in its response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action. “New reasons for designation were developed that include Dewdney’s policies and their impacts on Indigenous Peoples,” the board wrote. Yet despite its re-evaluation, the federal body decided that “no new plaque” for Dewdney would be prepared “as the limited text of a plaque does not allow for adequately communicating this complex history.”

Even as the palimpsest has not been fully scraped on the national level, efforts have continued in Regina. Several years ago, city councillors agreed unanimously to rename Dewdney Pool and voted overwhelmingly to rename Dewdney Park; both are now known as Buffalo Meadows. In late August, however, councillors were less enthusiastic about renaming Dewdney Avenue, with seven out of ten rejecting a proposal to do so. For now, at least, Dewdney’s name will continue to designate one of the longest streets in town. But does that necessarily mean Regina is honouring the man or making an “explicit endorsement” of his legacy, as one councillor, Dan LeBlanc, put it to reporters? Or is the label more indicative of a “complex history” and the various circumscribed ways we have to tell it?

Increasingly, when I think of cartography, I think of dendrochronology. It was Leonardo da Vinci who first posited that connections could be drawn between a tree’s growth rings and environmental conditions over time. Some rings indicate dry years, others wet. Some rings mark forest fires or volcanic eruptions. Put another way, growth rings don’t make judgment calls as they aggregate a record of the past, both good and bad, comfortable and uncomfortable. Nor can they ever convey the whole story.

Except in those smaller communities where every street is named after a letter or a number, I can list few city maps that could pass the contemporary virtue test with full marks. But if we occasionally liken the thoroughfares and other landmarks that dot them to growth rings — markers but hardly definitive records of our shared patrimony — we may be able to interact with them differently going forward.

“Does anyone think, if we were naming a new road today, we would name it after Edgar Dewdney?” LeBlanc asked his colleagues before the August vote. Of course not. But nobody would christen the western hemisphere after Amerigo Vespucci either. In fact, the mapmaker who did, in 1507, almost immediately regretted it. As Martin Waldseemüller learned 500 years ago, when he realized that the Italian explorer did not merit cartographic immortality, it can be a lot easier to put words on a map than to remove them.