New Brunswick’s Aboriginal Affairs Minister Arlene Dunn said the province won’t be heeding calls to return the Saint John River to its original name.
“There’s no intention of renaming the Saint John River,” Dunn told the legislature’s estimates committee on Wednesday.
In 2021, the Wolastoqey Nation formally requested the river be renamed Wolastoq. Last year the province’s systemic racism commissioner Manju Varma also recommended the name be changed to the Saint John Wolastoq.
The chief of Kingsclear First Nation, Gabriel Atwin, said he was disappointed to hear the request would not be honoured, adding that it would have been an important step in mending the strained relationship between the provincial government and the Wolastoqey Nation.
“It may seem like a small gesture but it’s larger than that, it’s a repairing of a relationship,” he said.
“We continue to struggle getting that recognition from the government of New Brunswick that we are in fact governments, that we are a nation.”
The river is an important part of Wolastoqey culture and the original name, Wolastoq, is where the nation derives its name, which means “the people of the beautiful and bountiful river.”
Atwin said changing the name would be a recognition of that cultural importance.
“This gives us our identity back and it’s important that the children, that the Wolastoqey children understand that this is our river, this is our identity,” he said.
Speaking with reporters Thursday, Dunn said it simply wasn’t feasible to change the name and added that since not everyone agrees with changing it, it should stay as is.
“The Saint John River is much more complicated. It’s not just changing the name, it’s actually crossing an international border so it’s much more complicated,” she said.
“I would say in addition to that, there’s lots of folks in the province, although we have people who want to change the name, there’s many others who also want it to stay the same so we have to respect those opinions on both sides.”
Dunn admitted that the province hadn’t spoken to Maine or the federal government about changing the name and said the government had considered the compromise suggested by the systemic racism commissioner to use a hybrid name.
“There hasn’t been a lot of discussion with respect to it,” she said.
Green Leader David Coon said he was perplexed by Dunn’s claim that the river’s use as an international border complicates renaming it. He said there are other examples across the country where a location has a different name on one side of the border than the other.
“There’s a reasonable solution here that doesn’t mean disenfranchising, continuing to disenfranchise the Wolastoqey people from the roots of their being and that’s the river and its watershed,” he said.
Dunn said the government is instead focused on renaming racist and derogatory place names. There are at least half a dozen names that use a derogatory term that will be renamed and a public consultation process will be unveiled soon.
Yet the initial request to rename the Saint John River came from a similar process, where the province asked for submissions to rename places to better reflect Indigenous history and remove derogatory terms about two years ago.
Dunn said the province didn’t receive any requests regarding the derogatory place names from First Nations at the time.
“This is something that should have been addressed a long time ago,” she said.
“We want to start that process again, we think it’s really important to engage First Nations as well as the public.”