two-spirit

Turn-of-the-twentieth century photo of We’wha, a Zuni lahamana, a male-bodied person who wears a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing and performs social and ceremonial roles associated with women. A Zuni person in traditional dress sitting on the floor and weaving.

21 July 2021

Two-spirit or two-spirited is a term for Indigenous North American people who do not conform to the cis-heterosexual norm of white, settler-colonist society. It is a relatively recent coinage, created as a calque of the Ojibwe niizh manidoowag, but that phrase has no traditional cultural significance or currency in Ojibwe culture. Two-spirit is an English-language term.

The concept of gender variability is not consistent across Indigenous North American cultures, and different tribes have their own terms with meanings that fit the cultural contexts of each particular group. Such terms include: nádleehé (Navajo), winkte (Lakota), warharmi (Kamia), hwame (Mohave), and lhamana (Zuni).

Two-spirit evokes the concept, present in some Indigenous traditions, of a person who presents the affect of both male and female genders, while biologically conforming to either the male or female sex. But from its coinage, two-spirit has been used as an umbrella term, including people from across the spectrum of gender variability, including those who in settler-colonist contexts would be labeled as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, transgender, non-binary, drag queen, or butch.

Two-spirit was coined at the Third Annual Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in 1990 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was deliberately invented as a replacement for the French word berdache, which had been borrowed into English by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This word and its English variant bardash also have the sense of a male prostitute, and as a result, despite being widely used in scholarly literature, berdache and bardash are considered to be slurs. But a new term was needed because the usual English ones, such as gay or lesbian, did not reflect the unique aspects of gender variability in Indigenous cultures. Thus, two-spirit was coined.

There is testimony as to the coinage of the term at the 1990 Winnipeg conference, but as far as I can tell there are no written proceedings from that meeting. The earliest written use of two-spirit I have found is in the name of an Indigenous women’s dance troupe. An article in Boston’s Gay Community News of 25 May 1991 mentions a scheduled performance of that group at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta, held 24–28 April 1991, that was cancelled because of organizational and diversity concerns:

The Two Spirited Dance Troupe, a Native American company, was scheduled to open the Thursday night plenary session. However, in solidarity with Spotted Eagle, the group did not perform. By this time Spotted Eagle had her own schedule changed so many times without being consulted that she decided to opt out.

By that fall, two-spirit was appearing in mainstream newspapers as an adjective, albeit in quotation marks. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune of 9 September 1991:

Some Indians said that, before boarding schools and white missionaries erased many traditional tribal beliefs, “two-spirit” people—gays and lesbians—held places of honor in native cultures.

Now, some American Indian gays and lesbians contend, European biases have replaced those old traditions.

Two-spirit, however, is not a universally accepted term, and even those who regard it as a valuable addition to the language recognize that it has its limitations. In the introduction to their 1997 book Two-Spirit People, a collection of articles on Native American gender and sexuality, editors Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang write:

The English phrase two-spirit, which originated primarily in urban Native American/First Nations contexts where English serves as a lingua franca to bridge cultural and linguistic differences, is not meant to be translated into Native American languages and terms. To do so may change the common meaning it has acquired since the early 1990s by self-identified two-spirit Native Americans. In some cultural contexts, translating it to a Native language could even be dangerous. For example, if "two-spirit" were translated into one of the Athapaskan languages (such as Navajo or Apache) the word could be understood to mean that such a person possesses both a living and a dead spirit—not a desirable situation. If "two-spirit" were translated into Shoshone, the literal translation would be "ghost." As a generic term for Native American gays, lesbians, transgendered individuals, and other persons who are not heterosexual or who are ambivalent in terms of gender, it is used in urban and rural environments, but not by all Native Americans who are, for example, self-identified as "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender," or "third gender" (that is, people who are neither women nor men within systems of multiple genders). Some reject the term just as others reject "berdache."

And Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, in his 2018 Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, notes:

It was coined to affirm the spiritual and cultural groundings of queer Indigenous folks, and to argue that Indigenous gender diversity and same-sex relationships included but were more than sexual acts or proclivities. It’s an important term of self-affirmation, and one that many people use today, especially in Canada. But it’s also a pan-Indigenous term that in many cases presumes a generic similarity across cultures, which is decidedly not the case, and does not translate well into many culturally specific understandings from communities with historical roles that we might today identify as similar to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identities. That doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t exist in these communities—that we didn’t or don’t matter. It just means that the broad concept of “two-spirit” might not be the best terminology for describing the culturally specific realities of gender diversity and sexuality expressions in all contexts.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

BonaDea, Maridee. “‘The Point Is We Tried’; The National Lesbian Conference Was at Times Contentious, at Times Victorious.” Gay Community News (Boston), 25 May 1991, 9. ProQuest: Magazines.

de Vries, Kylan Mattias. “Berdache (Two-Spirit).” Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Jodi O’Brien, ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2009.    

Driskill, Qwo-Li, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah A. Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti, eds. Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 2011, 4–6.

Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 2, 3–4. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018, 102–03.

Kelly, Suzanne P. “Gays Seek Niche in Minority Communities: Balancing Racial and Sexual Identities Can Be Difficult.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 9 September 1991, 9A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Lang, Sabine. “Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People.” In Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1997, 100, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions, June 2015, s.v. two, adj., n., and adv.

Photo credit: John K. Hillers, c.1871–c.1907. U.S. National Archives. Public domain image.

Columbia

WWI-era depiction of a personified Columbia reaching out to the American people. A woman in stars-and-stripes clothing, including a star-spangled liberty cap, facing the viewer with arms outstretched.

20 July 2021

Columbia is a poetic name for the Americas, and more specifically the United States. The name, of course, is homage to the genocidal killer Christopher Columbus, who stumbled upon the Americas by mistake, and who never, despite overwhelming evidence that he had not, in fact, reached Asia, admitted his error. There are numerous places named after the man, but the most prominent in English-speaking North America are the District of Columbia, the Columbia River, and British Columbia.

There is no single Indigenous name for the Americas. Perhaps the closest is Turtle Island, a name given by some North American Indigenous cultures to their homeland. The name comes from a legend that the earth was formed on the back of a turtle swimming in the sea of the universe.

Of course, the early European settler-colonists did not hold the Indigenous cultures they encountered in any regard. The adjectival form Columbian appears in the early seventeenth century. From Samuel Purchas’s 1625 travelogue Purchas His Pilgrimes:

And vnto Portugall was Spaine beholden for Columbus, and Columbus also for his skill, whereby the Columbian (so fitlier named, then American) World was discouered.

The feminized noun form (it is common to render Latin toponyms as feminine) Columbia is in place by the mid eighteenth century. William Douglass’s description of British possessions in North America uses the term. The last digit of the date in the digitized copy I have access to is illegible, but is probably a nine, making the date 1749. From the dates and events in the text, the book had to have been written in the closing years of that decade:

The whole Continent was called by his Name AMERICA. Here is a notable Instance of the Caprice of Mankind in giving this newly discovered Continent the Name America instead of Columbia: Americus made no Settlement, Columbus was not only the first, but also the more general Discoverer of this Land.

The United States’ constitution, written in 1789, calls for a federal district to house the country’s government, and ten square miles were carved out of Maryland and Virginia to form what would be called the District of Columbia. The newly created city was also known as Washington, probably to distinguish the new construction from the towns of Georgetown and Alexandria already existing in the district. (Virginia later reclaimed its portion, which included Alexandria.) The name District of Columbia is in place by 1791. From the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of 26 September 1791:

The City of WASHINGTON, in the district of Columbia, intended for the permanent seat of the Government of the United States, being now begun, a concise description of the situation, and present state of that metropolis, may not be altogether uninteresting to those at a distance.

On the other side of the continent is the Columbia River, the largest North American river to flow into the Pacific. Again, the settler-colonists ignored the Indigenous names for the river, one of which is is Nch'i-Wana (Great River) in Sahaptin, a language of the region. The Spanish dubbed the river Río de San Roque (Saint Roch River). But in 1792, American Captain Robert Gray and his ship Columbia Rediviva (Columbus Renewed) sailed into the river. Gray named the river after his ship, ignoring both the Spanish and Indigenous predecessors.

Later, the Hudson’s Bay Company established two administrative districts west of the Rockies. The northern one they designated as New Caledonia, and the southern one, which covered the Columbia River basin, was called Columbia. (Most of the HBC southern district was in what is now the United States.)

The British government took control of the territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1858, and the question of what to call the new colony arose. The first choice was New Caledonia, but that name proved unsuitable because it was also the name of the French territory in the South Pacific. In a letter to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, then the British secretary of state for the colonies, Queen Victoria selected the name British Columbia. Victoria writes in the third person:

The Queen has received Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's letter. If the name of "New Caledonia" is objected to as being already borne by another colony or island claimed by the French, it may be better to give the new colony west of the Rocky Mountains another name. New Hanover, New Cornwall, and New Georgia appear from the maps to be the names of subdivisions of that country, but do not appear on all maps. The only name which is given to the whole territory in every map the Queen has consulted is "Columbia", but as there exists also a Columbia in South America, and the citizens of the United States call their country also Columbia, at least in poetry, "British Columbia" might be, in the Queen's opinion, the best name.

Three days later, the British Parliament officially named the colony British Columbia. As reported by the Manchester Guardian of 27 July 1858:

The Earl of CARNARVON, in moving the second reading of this bill, explained at some length the nature of its provisions, and stated that the Government intended to alter the name of the colony from New Caledonia to British Columbia.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“BC Geographical Names.” Province of British Columbia, accessed 8 July 2021.

Douglass, William. A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America. Boston: Rogers and Fowle, c.1749, 65. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Columbia, District of Columbia, British Columbia. Oxfordreference.com.

“For the Maryland Journal” (26 September 1791). Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 30 September 1791, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Columbian, adj. and n.

“Parliamentary Proceedings.” Manchester Guardian, 27 July 1858, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes, book 2 of 5. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, §2.1.4, 8. Early English Books Online.

Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.

Victoria. “Queen Victoria Names British Columbia, 24 July 1858.” Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 5100111. Accessed 8 July 2021.

Image credit: Paul Stahr. “Be Patriotic,” c.1917–18, gouache on paper. National Archives. Public domain image.

think outside the box

Illustration of the connect-the-dots puzzle that accompanied the 1971 article in Data Management

19 July 2021

To think outside the box is to disregard artificial constraints on creativity, to engage in unconventional thought processes. The phrase as we know it arises from a puzzle used as an exercise in creative thinking. The phrase also has a precursor with slightly different wording: think outside the dots.

In the puzzle, nine dots are arranged on a 3×3 grid, and the participants are asked to connect the dots with four straight lines and without lifting the pencil from the paper. Most participants will keep their lines within the box defined by the grid, but the only solution, as shown in the accompanying illustration, is to extend the lines beyond the boundaries of the grid. The point being the restriction of keeping within the boundaries is an artificial one, imposed by the participants themselves and by extension that other, real-world, problems can be solved if only people disregard analogous artificial constraints.

While the phrase arose in the middle of the twentieth century, the metaphor underlying it is quite old, older than the puzzle itself. For example, there is this from an 1888 account of the British Parliament that uses think outside the lines:

He said that, having changed at Mr. Gladstone’s signal, from all but unanimous repudiation of Home Rule in 1885, to its enthusiastic support in 1887, the Liberal party became a one-man party, which scarcely ventured to think outside the lines prescribed by its dictator.

Other such framing of the metaphor can undoubtedly be found.

The earliest reference to the puzzle that I have found is in a religion column by the Rev. John F. Anderson in the Dallas Morning News of 30 October 1954. Anderson relates an account, real or imagined, of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor using the puzzle in a class with graduate students. He uses go outside the dots; the think would come a bit later:

“But prof,” one student protested, “that is not fair. You went outside the dots.”

“Who said you couldn’t?” was his disarming reply.

“Young men,” he continued, “we are not here to go through old routines. Don’t let your thinking be contained in a small square of knowledge. Learn to go “outside the dots” and you may be the one to solve some of man’s most puzzling problems.

A later use (see below) of the phrase by another preacher, makes me think the anecdote may have circulated in volumes of sermon illustrations that provide preachers with ideas for sermons.

But within a decade the puzzle and its accompanying lesson starts appearing in business management courses. From an article about just such a course in the 18 April 1963 Springfield Union:

We must ask ourselves: “What are the actual boundaries of the problem?” Perhaps, some of you have seen this little problem before. Here are nine dots, arranged in a square[.]

The problem is to connect all the dots by drawing four straight lines without removing the chalk from the black board and without retracing. Try it!

Did you first attempt to draw the lines within the boundaries of the nine dots? There is no rule that requires it. The solution demands that some of the lines extend into the space outside the dots.

And again from the Dallas Morning News, this time of 15 May 1964, is this list of courses at a conference of women accountants:

Speakers and their subjects will be Miss Ouida Albright of Fort Worth, Effective Use of Your Time; Mrs. Lauer, Managerial Accounting; Miss Ruth Reynolds of Tulsa, Okla., Internal Controls; Mrs. Engel, How to Conduct a Conference; Mrs. Mary Crowley, Going Outside the Dots, and C.L. Bateman of Tulsa, Cost Reduction in the Office.

But we don’t have the full think outside the dots. That comes by 23 May 1970 in a column in the Ottawa Journal. It uses the phrase, but the column makes no explicit reference to or explanation of the puzzle. The writer assumes the reader is familiar with it, or at least with the concept:

The problem, says William Davd [sic] Hopper, is to think “outside the dots” about questions of how to feed a hungry world.

He means that the need is to think imaginatively, creatively about the development of less-developed countries, and not merely to keep pouring more money and technology into patterns of foreign aid established, not very successfully, over the past 20 years.

While the column co-locates all the words in the phrase, its use of quotation marks separates think from outside the dots, indicating that the think was not yet part of the standard phrasing.

We get the complete phrase by 6 July 1980, when it appears in another newspaper column, this time in the Miami Herald:

Mrs. Roe was my English teacher in junior high school in Miami. One dictum ruled her classroom—and, I suspect, her life—and occasionally in a fit of passion she’d scrawl on the blackboard in letters a foot high: THINK OUTSIDE THE DOTS!

More often she uttered it—hurled it, really—and everyone came to know the pattern, to watch for it, to even relish it. She’d ask a question, get no response. A minute would pass while she still stared at us: a hush would fall. Then all at once she’d cry, “Think outside the dots! Think outside the dots!”

Think outside the dots is still in use, although it is far less common than think outside the box. Here is a more recent example of think outside the dots from the Trenton Evening Times of 28 February 2010:

Challenge brings success
Architect J. Robert Hillier says you have to “think outside the dots”

[...]

“It’s a great puzzle,” he explains, brandishing a pencil and solving the challenge. “But you have to go outside the dots. You have to extend the line beyond the rectangle. That the trouble with so many people.

“When people are confronted with the puzzle—any puzzle—they try to stay inside those dots. And the key to beating it,” Hillier adds with a smile, “is to go outside.”

The box wording can be traced to a 26 October 1969 newspaper column by preacher and self-help guru Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was enormously popular and influential, and his column would have been widely syndicated and read, and he is certainly responsible for much of the phrase’s popularity. Although, as with outside the dots, he doesn’t use the full phrasing of think outside the box:

There is one particular puzzle you may have seen. It’s a drawing of a box with some dots in it, and the idea is to connect all the dots by using only four lines. You can work and work on that puzzle, but the only way to solve it is to draw the lines to [sic] they connect outside the box. It’s simple, once you realize the principle behind it. But if you keep trying to solve it inside the box, you’ll never be able to master that particular puzzle.

That puzzle represents the way a lot of people think. They get caught up inside the box of their own lives. You’ve got to approach any problem objectively. Stand back and see it for exactly what it is. From a little distance, you can see it a lot more clearly. Try and get a different perspective, a fresh point of view. Step outside the box your problem has created within you and come at it from a different direction.

The full phrase think outside the box dates to a few years later and the September 1971 issue of the journal Data Management:

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

If you have kept your thinking process operating inside the lines and boxes, then you are normal and average, for that is the way your thinking has been programmed. Unfortunately, we have accepted thought process limitations that are artificial. They are man-made and do not exist in reality.

And as with the dots version, within a decade the phrase think outside the box could be used without explicit reference to the puzzle, assuming the readers would understand what was meant. From a syndicated medical column of 23 March 1978 by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn:

Some of my best teachers have been those who utilize the techniques of shock and surprise to rouse me out of conventional habits of thought, forcing me to question accepted teaching and stimulating me to “think outside the box.”

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Anderson, John F. “Down to Earth.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 30 October 1954, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1887. London: Rivingtons, 1888, 168. Google Books.

Barnebey, Faith. “On the Draft: ‘Think Outside the Dots!’” Miami Herald (Florida), 6 July 1980, 1–E. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Challenge Brings Success.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 28 February 2010, D1, D3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Inventiveness, Motivation, Training Needs of Scientists.” Springfield Union (Massachusetts), 18 April 1963, 52. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Mendelsohn, Robert. “People’s Doctor.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans) (syndicated), 23 March 1978, 4–7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Notaro, Michael R. “Management of Personnel: Organizational Patterns and Techniques.” Data Management, 9.9, September 1971, 77. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

O’Toole, Garson. “Antedating of ‘Outside the Box.’” ADS-L, 3 May 2010.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. box, n.2.

Peale, Norman Vincent. “Confident Living: Never Give Up.” Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 26 October 1969, 23. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘To Think Outside the Box’: Meaning and Origin.” Wordhistories.net . 28 April 2021.

Westell, Anthony. “Ottawa in Perspective: Canada Entering Big League in Research.” Ottawa Journal, 23 May 1970, 7. Newspapers.com.

“Women Accountants to Sponsor Seminar.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 15 May 1964, 3–2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Notaro, Michael R. “Management of Personnel: Organizational Patterns and Techniques.” Data Management, 9.9, September 1971, 77. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Washington (DC & state)

Detail of an 1887 copy of Pierre L’Enfant’s 1790 plan for Washington, DC, showing the major streets, the Mall, Congress House (i.e., the Capitol) and the President’s House (i.e., what would become known as the White House)

16 July 2021

Washington may very well be the most common toponym in the United States. In addition to the state and the federal capital, numerous counties, towns, streets, and other places are named for the country’s first president, George Washington.

The name Washington has been associated with the District of Columbia since 1791. Washington was founded to be the capital of the United States, carved out of the territories of Maryland and Virginia, and included the already existing towns of Georgetown and Alexandria. (The Virginia portion, including Alexandria, was later ceded back to Virginia.) I cannot find any official documents designating the newly founded city as such—I’m sure they exist; I just haven’t found them—but there is this from the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of 23 September 1791:

On Thursday last was killed, in the city of Washington, and in the district of Columbia, by the falling of a tree, in opening one of the streets, Mr. WALTER HANSON, jun. a gentleman of great mechanical ingenuity, and unblemished reputation. He was in the employ of Mr. Ellicott, as one of his assistants.—He has left a disconsolate widow, four small children, and many friends to lament his untimely fate.

And the same paper a week later, on 30 September 1791, published a description of the plans for the new city, which began:

The City of WASHINGTON, in the district of Columbia, intended for the permanent seat of the Government of the United States, being now begun, a concise description of the situation, and present state of that metropolis, may not be altogether uninteresting to those at a distance.

There is also the state of Washington, of course, that is occasionally the source of confusion with the nation’s capital. That name dates to 1853 when the territory that would become the state was split from the Oregon Territory. Two names were in serious contention for the new territory, Washington and Columbia. The name Washington won out, despite some objections that it would cause confusion with the nation’s capital. (The fact that Columbia might cause confusion with the District of Columbia apparently was not a serious concern.) New York’s Weekly Herald of 12 February 1853 summarizes the congressional debate:

The House proceeded to act on the bill establishing the territorial government of Washington, the question being on concurring in the amendments reported from the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union.

Mr. JONES, (dem) of Tenn., moved to lay it on the table. Negatived, by ayes 26, noes 99.

The question being stated on agreeing to the title of the bill, to change the name from Columbia to that of Washington.

Mr. EVANS, (whig,) of Md., said he supposed that there was not in the whole United States one dissenting voice against doing all honor to George Washington, but he wished, if possible, to change the name of the proposed territory, for the single reason that there are two hundred towns and counties called Washington. His object was to avoid confusion in nomenclature.

Mr. STUART (dem.) of Mich., remarked that he did not like the name of Columbia changed, but, seeing it was the will of the majority to substitute that of Washington, he would interpose no objection.

Mr. EVANS said he made the remark to be heard elsewhere. He thought it was far more proper to call the capital of the Union after the name of Washington; and, to avoid difficulties of geographical nomenclature, he trusted one of the beautiful Indian names would be given to the new Territory.

The title of the bill was then changed to the “Territorial Government of Washington.”

The bill was afterwards passed, by 128 yeas to 29 nays.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“For the Maryland Journal” (26 September 1791). Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 30 September 1791, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“George-Town, September 17. Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 23 September 1791, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Territory of Washington.” Weekly Herald (New York), 12 February 1853, 51. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Original: Pierre Charles L’Enfant, 1790. Copy: U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1887. Library of Congress.

Northwest Territories

The Northwest Territories Proclamation of 2 December 1869, which announces the organization of the territory

15 July 2021

The rather unimaginatively designated Northwest Territories were organized and formally named in 1869. Prior to this, the land was referred to informally as the Northwestern Territory. It was once much larger than it is today, including what are now the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, Yukon, and parts of British Columbia. When the territory of Yukon was taken from it in 1897, the northwest in the name became something of a misnomer but was retained.

The Northwest Territories, as a settler-colonist creation, has no corresponding Indigenous name. However, the capital Yellowknife, on the northern shore of Tideè (Great Lake, a.k.a. Great Slave Lake) is named after the First Nations band that live in the area. Yellowknife is a loose translation of the Tłįchǫ, or Dogrib, (Northern Athabaskan) T'satsąot'ınę, which literally means metal or copper people, a reference to their production and use of copper tools.

While the Northwest Territories was officially organized and named in 1869, use of the lower-case northwest territories to refer to the region dates to at least 1857, when the term appears in London’s Morning Chronicle of 27 August. Unsurprisingly, the article is about the natural resources in the region that the British can exploit:

By the undeniable authorities quoted in my previous communications to your journal, the fact is established that, in addition to many other useful minerals—gold, silver, cinnabar, copper, malachite, iron, lead, tin, coal, petroleum, sulphur, plumbago, soapstone, porcelain clay, gypsum, many beautiful varieties of jasper, and fine porphyry, tourmaline, cornelian, and brilliant and precious garnets have been found (some of them in vast quantities) in many parts of the Hudson’s Bay and north-west territories, the northern portions of which (intended by the Colonial-office to be left in the hands of the company for ever) being even more valuable in these products than the southern.

The North-West Territories Proclamation of 2 December 1869, which calls the territory officially into existence as of the previous day, reads in part:

And whereas her majesty has declared and named the first day of December instant as the day for the admission of Rupert’s land and the North-Western Territory into the union and Dominion of Canada; and whereas by virtue and in pursuance of the British North American Act of 1867, the Rupert’s land Act of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight, the said act for the temporary government of Rupert’s land and the North-western Territory when united with Canada, and the said declaration and order of her majesty, Rupert’s land and the north-western territory have been admitted into union with, and have now become part of the dominion of Canada, and are henceforth to be known as the north-west Territories.

The Northwest Territories officially came into existence in 1869, and in that year the Red River Rebellion began, when Métis and First Nations allies under the leadership of Louis Riel who objected to the terms under which the land, known as Rupert’s Land, was being transferred from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada. An article in Washington, DC’s National Intelligencer of 20 December 1869 uses the proper name. The use of half-breeds in the article is a derogatory reference to the Métis. (The Métis are one of the three major groups of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the other two being the First Nations and the Inuit. The Métis are mix of French and Indigenous ancestry but who maintain a distinct culture.) Fort Garry is an old name for the city of Winnipeg:

Colonel Dennis, Dominion Surveyor General of the Northwest Territories, has succeeded in raising and arming some two hundred Swampy Indians and a number of their English half-breed relations, and that they have garrisoned the stone fort so as to form a junction with the Canadians, Sioux, and Minnesetas at Portage La Prairie, and will march upon the provisional force near Fort Garry.

The Red River Rebellion was suppressed in 1870, but the Canadian government ended up granting some of the demands of Riel and the Métis, including the formation of the separate province of Manitoba, which was carved out of the Northwest Territories.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

“The Hudson’s Bay and North-West Territories as a Field for British Enterprise.” Morning Chronicle (London), 27 August 1857, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 20 December 1869, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Pearce, Margaret Wickens. Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada (map). Canadian-American Center, University of Maine, 2017.

Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.

“The Red River Rebellion.” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier (Bangor, ME), 1 April 1870, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“We Are T’satsąot’inę: Renaming Yellowknife.” Edgenorth.ca, 31 August 2016.

Yellowknives Dene First Nation.

Image credit: Northwest Territories Proclamation. Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN ID number 123044. Public domain image.