Contents:
Indigenous traditional place names

Place names, and the traditional knowledge they encode, connect Indigenous cultures to the lands, waters, and skies they have stewarded since time immemorial. They are very difficult to find in any well-cited, structured format, whether within or across languages.

NAMES 🗺️ aims¹ to provide a searchable and visual (mapped) interface to enable us all to connect to continuing Indigenous stewardship of the places we live. Today, we know them by exotoponyms, names given them by those from away. Reconnect with the endotoponyms you’re missing, the contextual names given places generations hence.

About this research

Place names are sovereign data. Names are intellectual cultural property of the peoples who described their worlds with them. Endotoponyms are critical in establishing legal title. They may include sensitive indicative references to the locations of precious cultural assets and resource areas. Use this resource respectfully and responsibly.

Factso disclaims authority over the names and their metadata; these names are “owned” by their Indigenous stewards.

1. This is, obviously, an enormous endeavour, to be done piecemeal, with no agenda beyond respectful duplication and factual clarity. Given the endless volume of endotoponyms both known and lost, this cannot have a timeline to “complete.” Currently, Factso’s queued backlog of scans and datasets is enormous, with most depth on southern Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and adjacent Salish Sea coastal river systems. ↩︎