FPCC’s Braided Knowledge Grant supports the restoration and sharing of naming practices in Kingcome Inlet.
The path to decolonization can sometimes lead in unexpected directions. Just ask Lindsey Willie, the General Manager of the Nunwakola Cultural Society, a non-profit organization that serves the Dzawada’enuxw community in Gwa’yi (Kingcome Inlet). In recent years, with the support of FPCC Heritage grants, the society has organized projects to research, digitize and archive Dzawada’enuxw belongings and traditional knowledge that were lost to the community because of colonization.
“We go to these places, and we get pieces of information, and it’s like we’re collecting parts of ourselves,” says Lindsey. “And when you start to understand more and put it all together, you start to see how our ancestors thought of the world. How they were really connected to the land and to the language, especially language – we’ve been finding a lot of old language in these places – and there is a bit of shift into that worldview. We’re not fully there. It takes a lot to decolonize your thoughts and your mind, your view and perspective, but the more we bring back, the stronger we’re going to be as Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw (four tribes of the Dzawada’enuxw).”
Information on naming protocols has been found alongside the search for belongings and heritage knowledge removed from the community. With funding from FPCC’s Braided Knowledge Grant and the Repatriation Pilot Project, Nunwakola staff and researchers visited several museums and archives across Canada and the United States to digitize their documents, photos, audio recordings and videos, all holding pieces of cultural information relating to the Dzawada’enuxw people.
The Importance of Naming
Uncovered along the way in research on Dzawada’enuxw culture was information on how the Dzawada’enuxw People used to hand down names, a very complex and integral component of Dzawada’enuxw culture and Kwak̓wala language.
“The Dzawada’enuxw follow as closely as possible our intricate system of naming protocols but, because of the breakdown in knowledge transfer that came as result of the Potlach ban, residential schools and oppression by the government and church, some of the details of our system have been forgotten,” Lindsey says. “The purpose of our current Braided Knowledge Grant project is to facilitate communal learning around these traditional ways of naming.”
To begin the project, community Knowledge Keepers are compiling and analyzing information on Dzawada’enuxw naming protocols. A key characteristic of Dzawada’enuxw names is that they follow processes that recognize the stages of life: birth, adolescence, marriage and old age amongst others. Kwakwaka’wakw names are multisyllabic with primary meaning contained in the stem of the word and supplementary meanings applied by the combination of following syllables. The process of naming is fundamental to the Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch system and is one of the primary reasons for potlatching. Names are hereditary and deeply tied to family genealogy, histories and land bases.
“Kwakwaka’wakw names identify you as a certain family member and connect you to the ancestors in your story. It’s a really personal thing,” Lindsey says. “If we were able to go back to that way of doing things, I think we would all have a stronger sense of where we’re from, what part of the land we’re from, because it refers to that. It’s very meaningful.”
Sharing the Knowledge
The projects have also helped support the creation of resources and presentations to share the newly found information, which, Lindsey feels, is most important:
“I think it’s important because we all need each other to hold this worldview together,” she says. “If we’re kind of separate in our own corners trying to figure out this worldview, what’s the point? Helping everyone else understand what is in these places gives us a shared knowledge base to build upon together, and really, that’s what culture is.”
The naming information collected will be presented and discussed with Knowledge Keepers and the community in two learning sessions. The project team also plans to create a short story with illustrations to go with the sessions. The story will narrate the life cycle of a person, showing how their names would be received throughout their lifetime. This booklet will make the learning accessible to all ages and can be used as a resource for future generations.
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Read more stories about FPCC Heritage Grant projects here.
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