Substantial federal, territorial, provincial, and Indigenous-led activity addresses both parts of Call 36. The Geographical Names Board of Canada (GNBC), the federal-provincial-territorial coordinating body for official geographical names, published its Best Practices for Indigenous Place Naming in December 2023, explicitly informed by Articles 13 and 19 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, and the First Nations Principles of OCAP. Three Indigenous Advisors have been appointed to the GNBC by Natural Resources Canada to ensure that the Board’s work reflects the distinct role of Indigenous Peoples in revitalizing traditional place names. The Indigenous Geographical Names dataset, extracted from the Canadian Geographical Names Database, currently contains more than 20,000 official place names of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis origin in over 60 Indigenous languages.
Active renaming activity at the territorial and provincial levels includes Nunavut’s restoration of community names (Hall Beach to Sanirajak, Cape Dorset to Kinngait), Yukon’s renaming of Mount Higgins to Jùuk’an in Tetlit Gwich’in, and the Northwest Territories’ adoption of multiple Indigenous community names since 2015. The Nunavut Inuit Heritage Trust’s Place Names Program has approximately 10,000 traditional Inuit place names yet to be added to Canada’s official corpus since the territory was established in 1999. The federal-provincial-territorial Stories from the Land interactive web map, launched in 2019, provides a public interface for engaging with Indigenous place names across Canada. Indigenous-led mapping projects extend across the country, including the Atlas of Kanyen’kehá:ka Space, the Untitled ṮEṮÁĆES haptic map (W̱SÁNEĆ / Lekwungen), and the Maanjiwe Nendamowinan placekeeping project (Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Toronto Islands).
Academic evaluation by Hayes (2023) found that Inuvialuktun place names remain substantially under-represented in major online mapping platforms: of 313 traditional place names recorded in the Inuvialuit Nuna Aliannaittuq atlas, only 2 appeared in Google Maps, 5 in OpenStreetMap, and 19 in the official NWT names list, indicating significant gaps between official adoption and digital implementation.
