Talk:Strait of Georgia

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

I'm removing the merge tag, considering it's been there since November 2006. Feel free to re-add it. -- 71.62.82.126 23:46, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

The Salish Sea article I want to put a merge tag on, guess I'll have to do it to this page; this page being about the shores of the Gulf of Georgia (our other name for it, and including other straits and sounds than the Strait itself I think, e.g. Haro/Rosario Straits, Sansum and Trincomali Narrows. Georgia Basin should redirect here, as should Georgia Depression, but they both redirect to Salish Sea, which somewhere along the line got merged with an older article called "Whulge", which seems to be a trendily-pseudo-native name for the Lushootseed-speaking part of these waters and their shores. Salish Sea, to me, is bogus, and so was Whulge; they may have some currency on the US side of the line, in which case the {{globalize}} tag should be added; but even the title is USA-centric, if it's USA anything. That's it for now, the main merge discussion will be on Talk:Salish Sea.Skookum1 04:05, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

My bad, as Salish Sea is apparently an invention of hippie types from Saltspring and Cortes (cf. item in Heritagehouse.ca catalogue) but on the other hand it's also used in Washington schools and brand names. Whatever, it's still a dorky name and the real name, especially in the heritagehouse-cited context (Saturna to Cortes) the REAL and usual name is Strait of Georgia, or at best Gulf of Georgia (since the Strait of Georgia ends somewhat just shy of those islands). But I think maybe Gulf of Georgia either needs a separate section here, or its own page (as it includes Saltspring, which isn't on the Strait of Georgia).Skookum1 05:20, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Er, um, well, then again, here's a just-now quote from a friend's letter on this subject; he lived on Mayne Island until a few weeks ago, and lives in Cadboro Bay in Saanich now:

For the Strait of Georgia, I'd exclude Howe Sound and Haro and Rosario, but the Strait goes all the way up, beyond Texada, to the bottom end of Johnston Strait. The "Gulf" is (or was) considered that body of water we might now call the Southern Strait of Georgia, and the southern part of that is "The Southern Gulf," which is a designation that persists in "the Southern Gulf Islands," which takes in everything south of Saltspring, and also Galiano. Where I'm living now is still disorienting. Parts of the San Juans, like up at Friday Harbour, are almost to the north of me.

Sigh. It's like the "Lower Mainland" issue (cf. Talk:Lower Mainland and also Talk:Pacific Northwest; casual/colloquial usages that people don't use with precise definitions; more of a state of mind than a set of parameters....Skookum1 05:22, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh no no, it is not Courtenay/Comox they are two different places, our town ought not to be lumped in with those hicks

The Strait of Georgia is the official name used on all maps and textbooks. If you merged the title to Salish Sea, you would not be using the correct name. Mkdw^talk 07:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

The "official" name according to the government of BC? The aboriginal caretakers of the land don't count? That's not a neutral point of view.

Besides, the settlers' name was Georgia Strait until they tried to dissociate their name from the underground newspaper with the pun for a name, the Georgia Straight. I don't know if the name was officially changed or not. Korky Day 09:50, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

More to the point for Wikipedia, "Strait of Georgia" is the most common name by far in English for the body of water in question, with "Georgia Strait" second, and "Salish Sea" a distant third. From what I can tell by online usage, "Salish Sea" is used mainly by tour companies and bloggers, with the exception of one environmental conference held in 2005. Newspapers, governments, and other widespread publications seem to use "Strait of Georgia" or "Georgia Strait". --Delirium 00:34, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

And I'm unaware of any First Nations or Native American politician or press person or academic who's chosen to use it; what its name is in Straits Salish or Shishahlhalem or Halkomelem I wouldn't know, if it even has one - perhaps I should know it, but I'm unaware of any campaign to lobby for a change/reversion (different areas of it are more likely to rather than the whole, but I wouldn't know for certain) and there's that awkward issue of the Kwak'wala speakers at its northern end. There's no way the Kwak'wala name for this body of water, if there is a Kwak'wala name for the whole, is going to resemble any possible equivalent in the Salishan languages; except marginally by way of a loanword from Comox (the Island Comox were absorbed into the Southern Kwakiutl, now the Cape Mudge and Campbell River Bands in Indian Act terms) or by way of the Chinook Jargon - in which case "out on the chuck" suffices to mean anywhere on the straits ("hyas saltchuck" for the wide open sea east of the Island), and "the straits" here generally referring the larger agglomeration; and in the context of "inland waters" roughly synonymous with the Gulf of Georgia, a term which includes inter-island waterways outside the Strait of Georgia. But "Salish Sea" is a no-go, no-register, invented term that like certain others people insist on trying to supplant other terms with just doesn't work for me. And to my knowledge has no First Nations/Native American support, either.Skookum1 08:57, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

A certain Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, Gregor Robertson chooses to consistently refer to it as the Salish Sea when speaking in the Legislature. here and here for example (CTL+F for "Salish")). It certainly hasn't been officially formalized/frequently used by any indigenous or settler source that I'm aware of or have spoken with, however.--Keefer | Talk 09:24, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, it just sounds pretentious, as with Whulge (which now, hopefully, is a redirect to somewhere real). Cascadia is similarly a word that's been "pitched" although I grant that it's actually caught on in its own way; but partly because it does have an overt agenda, which these don't; just ethnocultural pretentiousness, being more Indian than the Indians. Pity about Robertson; I've rather liked him until you told me that. Strikes me as a p.c. toady then....Skookum1 00:17, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Probably "trying to hard" in his case.--Keefer | Talk 08:39, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. I wonder if we can find a Kwak'wala speaker who will say that that's politically incorrect and call Robertson on the carpet about ignoring the Chemakuan and Kwakwaka'wakw with this imperialistic name..."Salish" continues to not be an ethnicity/tribe name, but continues in use by our media (and even our supposedly enlightened leftist politicians) as if it were.....thus are neologisms born.....Next thing you know, white people in the Lower Mainland will be p.c.-correct referred to as hwelitum....Skookum1 15:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

LOL on your suggestion. That'd be fun wouldn't it (the 'imperialism card')? ;)--Keefer | Talk 20:55, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, all the more convincing if I was actually FN. Think I'll throw this one by OldManRivers, though ;-). Skookum1 21:05, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

And Raven stole the sun, flew down the water and shouted to the heavens, "I am the Alpha, the Omega, the Universe, and I name this water way, "Salish Sea"!". Well, that didn't actually happen, but, some touristy hippies might think so. lol. I'm part Sḵwxwú7mesh and Kwakwaka'wakw. As far as I know, we never had a name for that entire area (hell, we have three names for Howe Sound, and there's over ten names for Fraiser River from all the different nations on the coast (even as far as the Haida and Nisga'a had a name for the Fraiser Rivers. I agree, it's quite a settler things to call it Salish Sea, but probably because it's in Coast Salish territory. My thoughts: never heard it called [[Salish Sea] before, or even this Whuldge (sp?). But, I'll ask around, but I highly doubt there was one name for this entire water way. OldManRivers 00:58, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

• Whulge is the supposedly Lushootseed word for it, although I suspect the original Lushootseed term is for a particular stretch of Puget Sound, not the whole entity, and not the land-basin it sits in, which is the pretense of that word. Puget Sound is really a side-bay of the long strait which encircles Vancouver Island and is broken up variously as Juan de Fuca-Haro/Rosario-Georgia-Johnstone-Queen Charlotte-Hecate, but there's this effort to name the whole basin; we've never come up with a satisfactory one in English, e.g. Georgia-Puget Basin maybe but it's not very poetic is it; at least not as clunky as Georgia Strait-Puget Sound basin; and I think it would have been this way even if the boundary weren't where it is; i.e. if the region hadn't been partitioned; unless you step out "above the map" the notion of a broader basin wasn't something on peoples' minds when the names were being pasted on the landscape around here. i.e. I think the Gulf of Georgia vs Puget Sound distinction would have remained, and no one word is possible; if it were all one native people spanning the whole region, with one language and not twenty, we might have a place to start; but as you note even within those languages placenames tend to be locality-specific, rather than "big" geographic concepts which, in marine terms, really aren't but look that way to landlubbing peoples. It would certainly be good to include any Halkomelem or Skwxwu7mesh or Shishalhalem or Nooksack words for the Strait, if any of those languages has a single concept/word - Halkomelem I'd expect it to, because the language spans the Strait, but I think we'd all have heard it by now if there was one. "Salish" also was originally the particular name of a particular people in Montana (who never got anywhere near the sea..); aka Selisch as it might have a redirect for already; it's an "outside" term generalized far from the Salish people's home turf by linguists and anthropologists...Skookum1 01:25, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.