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NUNAVUT
With only one full-time toponymist and her assistant, Nunavut is not doing enough to preserve the Inuit cultural tradition of Inuktitut place names, Inuit Heritage Trust's place names manager Lynn Peplinski says.

"The Geographic Names Board of Canada figures we (Nunavut) have only made official 850 names since April 1999, so that's fewer than 100 names a year," Peplinski said after a presentation at the Nunavut Research Institute. "We must have 6,000 (ready to process). Just do the math. There's a lot of work to be done."

Peplinski and her colleagues, including traditional place names co-ordinator Sheila Oolayou, have been working with elders across Nunavut to identify traditional place names since 2001, and Peplinski started doing this work in 1993, she said. Names are preserved in Google Earth files that are available on request.

"Inuit grew up in this land and this land shaped who they are," Peplinski said. "The travel routes, the shortcuts over land, the great berry-picking places, where you go to hunt for seal, caribou, whale, fish - you had to know this or you didn't survive. They named all the details of the land that were important. Any place of any significance to anybody had a name. It's really like an environmental inventory. There's a place called seal soup, where there are so many seals that it's like a soup. There's a place where the seals were found to be swimming with their bellies up. The names are very evocative."

She wants the Government of Nunavut to find a way to take the body of work her team has completed and accelerate the process before the culture and language is lost.

"(Quebec and) Nunavik did this and they were really into topography," she said. "Forty people were working in the toponymy at one point. They said, 'All this work is being done in the communities, so there's no point in reviewing everything again.' They became satisfied that Avataq (the independent group collecting the names) did the due diligence they needed to do to make sure the information was accurate.

"We're looking at a way to get the Government of Nunavut to look at that precedent. It's an uphill battle."

Territorial toponymist Pauline Arnatsiaq, who is based in Iglulik, said it's not that easy.

"If we approved them like they did in Quebec, if I just had them approved the way they were submitted, maybe there would be some duplicates and I would get complaints about that," Arnatsiaq said. "I noticed a couple of them that were trying to have one feature have two names in one submission. Only a couple of those, not so many."

Peplinski acknowledges that errors happen occasionally, but doesn't believe it should take long to fix them.

"Occasionally names come back because they need clarification because the co-ordinate is not placed in the middle, or it's a little bit off to the left, or there are two places with the same name but with different spellings," she said.

With 850 approved names over the last 13 years, the average year sees only 65 approved. Assuming a 250-day work year, it would take an average of four days for each name to be approved by one person. With 2.5 positions in her department, a number cited by Arnatsiaq, it would take almost 10 days for each name.

"I make sure that what they're submitting is the correct feature on the map, and to see if that feature is in the correct location that they have submitted," Arnatsiaq said. "If some names need to be fixed, I ask for clarification from the submitter, and one time it took a year for the submitter to answer. That slowed down the process. Some submitters answer very quickly. "

Peplinski does not place the blame on Arnatsiaq and her staff, suggesting instead that the Government of Nunavut is not serious enough about preserving the names.

"There's just not a good process in place at the moment," she said. "It's taking too long. There's just not a commitment, I think, to really look at and improve this process. It's a big problem."

Oolayou believes the names are at risk of being lost if the government doesn't step up.

"The thousands of Inuktitut names for places have been around a long time," Oolayou said. "We feel it's important that these are present on Canada's maps. If traditional place names do not appear on Canada's map, does it mean they do not exist? Out of sight, out of mind. Where is the evidence of the reality of presence of Inuit on the land?"

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