Toronto’s Controversial Name Change
and what it can tell us about Powell River
If you live in Powell River, you probably already have an opinion on Tla’amin Nation’s request that the city change its name. If it’s news to you, its safe to say it’s become a divisive issue in our small coastal town.
At nearly every council meeting since the May 2021 request, there seems to be a delegation of concerned citizens who present arguments to council against changing the name. They have argued that Tla’amin Nation is attempting to “erase our ancestry, our history, the people from ‘Around The World’ that built the town of Powell River.” Sometimes they get vindictive, demanding that the city “remove the native flag as they do not respect our city and they are not taxpayers that have paid for the flag pole.” Their goal, as one delegate put it, is for “things to go back the way they used to be when we were all friends and living in Harmony.”
Part I — Names be Changing
I live in Powell River, but grew up in Ontario where my family has deep roots in Toronto — a city that went through its own renaming process almost two hundred years ago. Ever since Tla’amin requested that Powell River change its name, I’ve been curious to know what Toronto’s name change process looked like. What prompted the city to abandon its colonial name in favour of an Indigenous one — in an era before reconciliation or wokeness was a thing? How did people feel about it at the time? I believe that a close examination of Toronto’s name change can offer perspective, delight, and maybe even a small breath of calm to our small town’s conflict.
The city of Toronto gets its name from the Kanyen’kéha word Tkaronto, which means “the place in the water where the trees are standing” — a reference to tall wooden stakes that once formed fishing weirs in the area. The city is located at the site of a significant portage route connecting Lake Ontario with the northern Great Lakes, a strategic location that has been continuously occupied for millennia. When French explorers first encountered the area in 1615, it was called Teiaiagon, an Haudenosaunee village of 5,000 people and 50 longhouses, surrounded by cultivated fields. A result of smallpox and war, the Haudenosaunee abandoned their village a few decades later and the Mississaugas moved in. It was the Mississauga who occupied the land in 1751, when French fur traders founded the first European settlement in the area, Fort Rouillé. A few years later, after the defeat of the French and the end of the Seven Years’ War, English settlers started moving in.
The English reverted back to calling the settlement Toronto — until 1793, when the Duke of York (son of King George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British army) defeated French forces in Belgium. John Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, was so fired up by the English victory that he decided to rename the town in honour of the Duke, and issued a decree that “a Royal Salute of Twenty-one guns is to be fired to be answered by shipping in the harbour in respect to his Royal Highness and in commemoration of the naming of this harbour from his English title, York.” Thus Tkaronto became York.
Not everybody was on board with Simcoe’s renaming. His five year tenure as Lieutenant Governor left a mark on the land, erasing the existing names of lakes, rivers, pathways, and pasting over them names of his influential friends with positions in the British cabinet. An Irish writer travelling through Upper Canada at the time “lamented that the Indian names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others. Newark, Kingston, York are poor substitutes for the original names of the respective places Niagara, Cataraqui, Toronto.” The Mohawk leader Thayendanegea (Chief Joseph Brant), arguably the most influential Indigenous voice of the era, delivered a killer one-two punch against the Lieutenant Governor: “Simcoe has done a great deal for this province… He has changed the names of every place in it.” Many decided just to ignore the new name as “the ancient appellation was a favourite, and continued in ordinary use” — a small act of resistance against Simcoe’s campaign of anglicization.
York’s early days were not glamorous. It was a remote colonial outpost on the fringe of Britain’s empire — the streets were unpaved, there were no sewers or storm drains, and during rain storms the dirt roads would become impassable with thick mud. To differentiate the town from its more urbane namesakes York, England or New York City, people started calling it “dirty Little York,” or (my favourite) “nasty Little York”. By 1834 the town had grown from a muddy frontier town into a respectable capital city, but still couldn’t seem to shake its nickname. When a bill was introduced to incorporate as a city, the Legislative Council saw an opportunity and snuck in a last minute amendment: a name change from York to the City of Toronto.
In a town where over 93 percent of the population was British or of British ancestry, the name change was seen by some as an insult to their shared heritage — an affront to the memory of the Duke of York, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe, England, and the King himself. As the retired Chief Justice of Upper Canada, William Powell, wrote:
“When the mild and beneficent Government of the King of Great Britain was repelled from the colonies of Great Britain in 1783, his majesty devoted to the consolation of his Loyal adherents the superb territory of Upper Canada; first in climate, first in soil, first in water of the habitable globe. Providence seemed especially to protect its new population and render it the boast of the world until the exalted feeling of its Legislature could no longer brook the diminutive epithet of “York” given to its capital, by the monarch’s first representative in grate[ful] memory of what England was, and shrinking from all remembrance of her glory have urged to the seat of the King’s government the wild and terrific sound of Toronto.”
In Powell’s telling, how the English came to dominate the area is conveniently obscured — the land is passively gifted to his loyal subjects by a mild and beneficent King. There is no mention of the forced displacement of the Mississauaga, whose territory at this point had been reduced from 4,000,000 acres down to a 200 acre parcel on the Credit River.
Of course, not everyone was opposed to the name change. A record of the Parliamentary debate reveals the variety of opinions that were circulating at the time. Despite the old-timey language, the talking points will be recognizable to anyone following the Powell River name change saga today:
- Mr. Clark thought the change from “Little York” to “Toronto” would be good. It was the original name given by the natives of the soil. He well recollected the name some thirty or forty winters gone by, in the days of that great and good man Governor Simcoe (Hear!)… it would change the name from “Nasty Little York” to the City of Toronto.
- Mr. Jarvis thought the alteration of the name would cause confusion; and a majority of his constituents were opposed to it.
- Mr. McDonald admired the taste of the Legislative Council. The name of Toronto was highly musical.
- Mr. Willson was sorry to find that, now the Duke of York was no more, (the Town of York being named after that illustrious Prince) that Hon. Gentlemen were desirous of losing all recollection of that name. In the States there is the State of New-York and City of New-York, and they have never thought proper to alter the name; and why should they want to change the name of York to Toronto? …He was convinced great errors and confusion would arise from changing the name. He could not feel that the jingling sound of Toronto was so very musical and delightful.
- Mr. Berczy — surely the Hon. Member for Wentworth (Mr. Willson) could not have read the renowned History of Knickerbocker: if he had, he would have found the original name of the City now called New-York was “Manhattan,” — no doubt altered to the name of New-York from the affection of the settlers to the mother country; but he (Mr. Berczy) thought it was not good taste in altering the name from the Indian name “Manhattan.” He thought it was now an excellent opportunity to alter the name of this town now they were incorporating it into a City. He preferred the old original Indian names.
- Mr. Bidwell said the present name was short and convenient, and it was well known that it was given to the Town in honour of the brother of the King, the Duke of York; but now, since that illustrious personage had died, there seemed to be a desire to forget the name. He was satisfied much inconvenience would result from changing the name, and did not believe Hon. Members who were in favour of it could show an instance of the name of a town being changed after it had continued so long and was so well known in other parts of the world as York was, and had attained to its size and importance.
The vote passed with 22 for and 10 against — thus York became the City of Toronto.
Part II — So What?
What was the result of Toronto’s reclamation of its Indigenous name? Did anything change, other than the name? What can this tell us about Powell River?
One way to measure what Toronto’s new name meant to people at the time is by looking at the 1884 semi-centennial, a week-long celebration of Toronto’s incorporation where it “seemed the entire population of the province had made it a special point to be present.” In choosing to celebrate the semi-centennial in 1884, 50 years after its renaming, the moment of naming is reified as Toronto’s founding moment — effectively erasing not just Simcoe’s 1793 naming of York, but millennia of Indigenous occupation, of which “nothing remains to recall even their memory, but the well sounding name they invented for this locality.”
In parade floats, we can see the British occupation re-imagined, not as colonisers, but as equal partners with the Mississauga. One floats shows Britannia, symbol of British imperialism in the form of a sexy lady, with her outstretched hand kissed by an “Indian maiden, who is supposed to be in this way evidencing her gratitude and appreciation of the beneficent rule that is about to be inaugurated”. In another float we see an Indigenous warrior in regalia standing as an equal next to Britannia, observing as the city’s incorporation document is ceremoniously signed.
At the culmination of the parades, Daniel Wilson, “Orator of the Day,” and the first professor of history at the University of Toronto, was billed to give a speech on the history of the city. Instead, he told the assembled crowd that Toronto is a city with “scarcely a past either for pride or for shame.” He assured them “they had no record they need look back upon as even the greatest and noblest of the nations of the past had; no such record as even noble England had to look upon; of times of persecution, of civil war, and tyranny and despotism; that they had nothing practically to repent of; that they had great white sheets spread before them upon which they had to write the record of their city and young Dominion.”
This all points to the popular understanding of the time — Toronto didn’t really exist before it was named. History before the English was insignificant prehistory (a term Daniel Wilson himself coined in 1851). This belief persisted in the face of active resistance by the Mississauga against the erasure of their lands and culture — throughout this era multiple petitions had been sent to the colonial government in an attempt to retain the last of their rapidly vanishing lands which had been guaranteed to them by Treaty.
It’s safe to say that Toronto’s name change didn’t usher in a new era of reconciliation in nineteenth century Upper Canada. Instead, Indigeneity became a sort of window dressing to add a distinctly North American flavour to an otherwise English colonial city.
We can see the naming of Toronto as a sort of cautionary tale, if we apply its lessons to the City of Powell River as it considers a name change. It reminds us that the adoption of an Indigenous name has little real-world impact on who has access to decision making powers within a city. It is such a small gesture of reconciliation that a city decided to do it two hundred years ago - a decidedly un-woke period of history. While this might be comforting to those who seem to be afraid of a municipal takeover by Tla’amin Nation, it’s a reminder to the rest of us that changing the city’s name is a far cry from addressing historic and ongoing imbalances of power. Toronto also reminds us of how the moment of naming can become confused with the moment of origin for a city. Just as Toronto’s history didn’t begin with its naming in 1834, Powell River’s history didn’t start when it was named in 1955.
Sources
“Toronto Has No History!” Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City. Victoria Freeman May 5, 2010 https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/uhr/2010-v38-n2-uhr3707/039672ar/
The Town of York, 1793–1815; A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto. 1962. Firth, Edith G. https://archive.org/details/trent_0116403094612_5/page/n9/mode/2up
The Town of York, 1815–1834: A Further Collection of Documents of Early Toronto. 1966. Firth, Edith G. https://archive.org/details/publicationsofch0000unse/page/300/mode/2up
March 7th, 1834 edition, The Patriot https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.N_00521_182911/373
Speaking Notes, Delegation to Powell River City Council June 20, 2024. Diane Sparks https://powellriver.civicweb.net/FileStorage/4FAE4B03950D44D6BA15D15B654EE577-Speaking%20Notes%20-%20Diane%20Sparks.pdf
Email received May 29, 2024 from Ted Vizzutti regarding Respecting the City of Powell River: https://powellriver.civicweb.net/FileStorage/41276AC551454540A01AB8EFDC92060C-Correspondence%20-%20Vizzutti.pdf
Deception, Delays and Theft. The truth about tiskwat you won’t find in history books. Davis McKenzie. October 6, 2023. https://www.tlaaminnation.com/deception-delays-and-theft-the-truth-about-tiskwat-you-wont-find-in-history-books/
