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March/April 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Saguenay Floods Write to Know Our Home and Native Tongue

WHAT A CORNY, frumpish name! Confederation Bridge. Another bureaucratic bit of toponymic tedium from Ottawa. Another yawn of a Canadian name to dull the cartographical expanses of Canadian mappery, bland as some of it already is with boring place names. Did you know that Queen Victoria’s name appears more than 300 times on Canadian maps? Give us a break!

Some Canadians wanted the bridge that connects Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick to bear a distinctively Canadian Maritime name, The Abegweit Crossing. The word is pronounced EPP-eh-kwit, all syllables short.

For 10,000 years, Abegweit has been the affectionate way Mi’Kmaq people refer to P.E.I. Loosely translated from the Mi’Kmaq language, Abegweit means ‘cradled on the waves.’ Not too shabby a moniker for a bridge, eh? More precisely, the Mi’Kmaq root is epegweit, ‘lying in the water,’ or abahquit ‘lying parallel with the land.’ The first humans who came to the island were Mi’Kmaq hunters. They paddled to Abegweit even in winter by canoe to fish and take wild fowl; and after drying their catch along the shores of Bedeque Bay, they would return to permanent winter camps on the nearby mainland. The Mi’Kmaq divided their ancestral lands into seven parts, which still bear the ancient names, as attested in the Mi’Kmaq Grand Council for the District of Epekwitk.

MOST PEOPLE who have called the island home have been more than fond of this lovely, watery name. Here is Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, writing in 1939 in Prince Edward Island, "You never know what peace is until you walk on the shores or in the fields or along the winding red roads of Abegweit on a summer twilight when the dew is falling and the old, old stars are peeping out and the sea keeps its nightly tryst with the little land it loves."

Ships have proudly borne the name of Abegweit. A CNR automobile ferry that used to ply the waters of Northumberland Strait between New Brunswick and P.E.I. was christened M.V. Abegweit. In 1962, the body of water crossed by the ferry was officially named Abegweit Passage. Since the new bridge straddles this part of the strait, Abegweit Crossing is logical as well as resonant of history.

In 1604, Samuel de Champlain called P.E.I. Île de Saint Jean. The British possession of the island in 1759 caused a simple translation to St. John’s Island. In 1798, the British garrison at Halifax was being commanded by Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and some local royalist, some cringing lickspittle toady, thought it might show a pleasing deference to name yet another piece of colonial real estate after yet another imperial poobah. That Prince Edward, the island’s namesake, was the father of Queen Victoria.

So why has some glum mugwump in Ottawa named this structure Confederation Bridge? Are federal bullyboys reminding Islanders of how much they owe to Confederation, a reminder all the more piquant to Ottawa politicians in this year of a possible federal election? You betcha!

Elsewhere in Canada, enlightened officials are not abandoning native names like Abegweit. They are doing just the opposite. They are returning aboriginal place names to our maps. John Joe Sark, head of the Mi’Kmaq Grand Council for the District of Epekwitk, is in cheerful fettle in spite of the federal government’s decision to name the structure Confederation Bridge. In January, Sark was busy making plans for an alternate naming ceremony to which he is going to invite leaders of First Nations from across Canada. "What name are you going to use to consecrate the bridge?" I asked. "Abegweit!" laughed John Joe.

At the end of May, official celebrations to open the bridge will likely include a visit by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and assorted high muckamucks. Oh, the officials will be careful to invite a few Mi’Kmaq people. But not wanted at the party will be their word, Abegweit. Shame on an Ottawa deaf to history, deaf to the oldest human sounds to have echoed across this land, and deaf to those who hold Abegweit in their hearts, where it is a word as warm as home.

Bill Casselman is the author of Casselmania and Casselman’s Canadian Words.

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