[Talk-ca] First Nations reserve naming

[Hoser AB]

Hello all,



I think I'm the one who prompted Michael's question in the first place,
from comments on a change he made to the Tsuut'ina Nation next to Calgary (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/129596686).



First of all, I think we all need to back up and heed Amos's comment "it
ought to be a case by case thing and any mass changes are probably not
capturing the local naming unless the source data being applied has been
created that way". He's bang-on, right on the money with that. There is no
"top-down" solution here, to be uniformly applied to all aboriginal lands
across Canada, and relying entirely on an "official" federal government
source could result in the map taking an ethnocentric and colonialist
position on the matter.



Some reserves are occupied by multiple nations, or bands within a nation.
Some nations have multiple reserves. Some nations have one reserve. (Some
nations have no reserve!) Michael asked "Is it best to use the name of the
reserve, or the name of the group that inhabits the reserve?" To that I say
we should follow basic OSM naming policy: use the common name that someone
with a "boots on the ground" perspective would use. As such, often the name
of the nation *is* the common name of the reserve, especially nations with
one reserve. Pierre illustrated this very well: the Mistissini Cree people
live in a village called Mistissini on the reserve lands called Mistissini.
The name of the nation is sometimes applied to their reserve lands, to
certain sections of their reserve lands, to towns within those reserve
lands, or all at once.



It seems pretty obvious to me that Michael parsed through the list of
reserves from ISC/CIRNAC (
https://fnp-ppn.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/fnp/Main/Search/RVListGrid.aspx?lang=eng)
and believes we should be applying the "official name" to the "name=*" key
for the respective reserve relations on the map. However, some of these
names aren't current, and many aren't what anyone would commonly call these
reserves. In particular with respect to the Tsuut'ina, the reserve name
*is* the nation's name; the land itself *is* "the Tsuut'ina Nation".
Changing the name to "Tsuu T'ina Nation 145" is problematic for a couple
reasons:



1) as I just wrote, the common name of the reserve lands is "Tsuut'ina
Nation", so it should have primacy over the ISC/CIRNAC "official" "Tsuu
T'ina Nation 145", and,



2) the Tsuut'ina officially changed the English spelling of their nation's
name from "Tsuu T'ina" to "Tsuut'ina" years ago, and ISC/CIRNAC simply
haven't updated it. (This after generations of the "official" name being
"Sarcee", an exonym from the neighbouring Siksika (Blackfoot); calling
Tsuut'ina people "Sarcee" is not unlike calling Inuit "Eskimos"...) To
persist with the "Tsuu T'ina" spelling because it's "official" is, frankly,
disrespectful to the Tsuut'ina people.



Michael also deleted "name:srs=Tsúùtʼínà", the name of the nation (and thus
the reserve, see 1 above) in the Tsuut'ina language itself, from the
relation. He said in a comment that he has contacted the Tsuut'ina Nation
to ask what the name of the reserve is in the Tsuut'ina language, and he's
very quickly going to find out it's "Tsúùtʼínà"!


We have the "official_name" key and we can and should use it for official
names from ISC/CIRNAC or other official sources. In that respect the
information is not lost, but it also takes a back seat to what the actual
day-to-day name of these lands is. We should otherwise tread very carefully
with the "name" key, and in my opinion should give deference to the names
that the people who inhabit the land use.


Thanks
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