The Cordillera Campaign
A Grassroots Initiative to Rename Canada’s Pacific Province
Cordillerans for a Non-British Non-Columbia is a group of concerned citizens dedicated to the proposition that Canada’s Pacific province deserves a more appropriate, more descriptive, and more sweet-sounding name than the one it’s currently saddled with.
Truth be told, the place known as British Columbia is not and never has been either British or Columbian.
It’s true that Britain once laid claim to this far-flung corner of the globe, but it did so for not much more than a decade (1858–1871), or approximately 0.1 percent of the time that the land has been inhabited. The claim was, in any case, more than a little preposterous, considering that when the Brits advanced it they occupied less than five percent of the territory they professed to govern and were outnumbered a hundred to one by its indigenous people.
As for Christopher Columbus, the province’s other ill-conceived namesake, he firmly denied that there could even be such a place. Instead, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, he clung to his stubborn belief that the Atlantic Ocean stretched all the way from Portugal to Japan.
Fortunately, there’s another term for the majestic landscapes that run from the Canadian Rockies to the sea, a term already in use by geographers: Cordillera (core•dill•AIR•uh). According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, a cordillera is “a system or group of parallel mountain ranges together with the intervening plateaus and other features.” Wondering what the “other features” might be? The American Heritage Science Dictionary notes that they “include valleys, basins, rivers, lakes, and plains.” Ring any bells? Here, say we Cordillerans, we have a name that not only suits our province to a tee, but also one that, compared to its current moniker, is easier on the ears and rolls more smoothly off the tongue.
Argument
Now let’s get down to brass tacks and expand a bit on why we take exception to our province’s current name and think we’ve got a better one.
“British Columbia”: A double misnomer
First, we’re not British, although a lot of us do have some British ancestry. Second, we’re not Columbian, although some of us do live on or near the Columbia River. Our beautiful province bears the ill-sounding and unbefitting name it does merely on account of a couple of quirky and ephemeral accidents of history, which if you bear with us we shall recount in some slight detail.
Why is our province called Columbia?
Columbia is a literary name for the lands of the Western Hemisphere–that is, North, Central, and South America and the adjacent islands–based on the fanciful idea that these lands were discovered by Christopher Columbus during his famous voyages of 1492-1504. Today, of course, the Eurocentric presumption that underwrites such notions is painfully clear, and in any case it’s well established that the Norseman Leif Ericson beat Columbus to the punch by about five hundred years. More significantly, the first migrant bands of Asian hunter-gatherers did so at least twelve thousand years earlier still.
Columbus himself did not believe he had discovered anything other than a new route to East Asia, then known as the Indies, for which he mistook the Caribbean and South American lands on which he touched shore. The fact is, he never laid eyes on North America, where the province that bears his name happens to be situated, and if he had he would undoubtedly have mistaken it for China.
Our story now fast-forwards to 1821, the year of the first corporate mega-merger in North America, when the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) absorbed the North West Company and thereby gained a monopoly of the fur trade in the lands falling under its jurisdiction by contract with the Crown. The Columbia District (or Columbia Department) was the name the company then bestowed on a vast stretch of territory running from Fort St. James, near the geographic center of today’s province, to the northern border of California. It was so dubbed after the Columbia River, the major fur-trading route in the district, along which the principal HBC trading post, Fort Vancouver, was located (at the site of what is today Vancouver, Washington). The United States, which disputed the British claim, preferred to call it the Oregon Country.
In 1846, the Treaty of Washington established the 49th parallel as the southern limit of British North America and thus “effectively destroyed the geographical logic of the HBC’s Columbia Department, since the lower Columbia River,” henceforth belonging to the United States, “was the core and lifeline of the system” (Wikipedia).
Why is our province called British?
It is, after all, four times the size of the British Isles and located on the other side of the world. As we’ve already noted, Britain claimed colonial title to its territory for a brief sliver of time—a grand total of thirteen years, from August 2nd, 1858, to July 20th, 1871. As we shall see momentarily, the colony was more notional than real, and the presumptuousness of the British claim is difficult to exaggerate, considering that there were no more than a few hundred Brits living in it at the time of its foundation. They were vastly outnumbered by the thousands of Californians drawn north in the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858, who in turn were outnumbered by the tens of thousands of Aboriginal inhabitants of the land, though the British made no effort to include the First Nations in their censuses.
Indeed, they had no means of doing so, since for practical purposes the writ of the British administration ran no further than southern Vancouver Island, bits of the Lower Mainland along the Fraser and Thompson rivers, and the odd fur-trading post in the interior. The rest of the land making up “British Columbia,” perhaps ninety-five percent of it, continued to be inhabited and effectively governed by its indigenous peoples.
It is true that the Aboriginal population declined precipitously during the brief colonial interlude, largely on account of the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1862–63, while the non-Aboriginal population swelled with immigration from the United States, Canada, Britain, China, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, as of 1870, the year before British Columbia joined Confederation as a province and its colonial status was thereby dissolved, Aboriginals still outnumbered non-Aboriginals by well over two to one (Jean Barman, The West beyond the West, p. 120), most of them living beyond the purview of British authority. Thus, it’s a safe bet that the great majority of inhabitants of the supposed Colony of British Columbia never learned of its existence and would have been bemused or indignant if they had.
It’s all Queen Vicky’s fault!
It was Queen Victoria who came up with the name British Columbia. When the alarming influx of Americans during the gold rush of 1858 persuaded the Brits it was time to lay formal claim to the mainland (Vancouver Island had been designated a colony nine years earlier), her majesty learned that the name Columbia, after the HBC’s Columbia Department, had been proposed for the new colony by its British administrators, themselves largely former officials of the fur-trading company.
A better-informed monarch might have dismissed the suggestion as quaint, nostalgic, and ill-conceived, since, as we have seen, the economically important reaches of the river whose name the department bore had already fallen out of British hands, while the explorer whose name the river bore had been geographically challenged and more than a little pig-headed. Unhappily, no such considerations weighed upon the royal mind. What did trouble Victoria somewhat, however, was her recollection that a name very like Columbia had already been applied to a country somewhere in South America, and so she decided to tack on the adjective “British” to forestall any confusion. Needless to say, the queen never visited the place, nor indeed ever ventured much farther from her palaces than her favorite holiday destination, the European Riviera.
“British Columbia”: A thorn in the side of arts and letters
These, however, are mere historical quibbles. The real problem with Brit•ish Co•lum•bi•a is that it’s such a godawful mouthful, it puts our poets and songwriters at a serious disadvantage. Imagine the pickle poor Gordon Lightfoot would have got himself into if, instead of being “Alberta Bound,” he had set his sights just a tad further west. Put one foot across the continental divide, and all of a sudden he’s got three extra syllables to cram into his song every time he mentions the name of his target province. He mentions it six times, too, in each of the two choruses and five more times in the verses, so you do the math. Not only that, but the vowel sounds that get accented every time a person tries to sing Brit•ish Co•lum•bi•a are particularly short and ugly ones: ih and uh. Take our word for it, the result would be a song not worth singing, not even by Lightfoot, not even in the shower.
“Cordillera”: As fitting a name as a geographer could bestow
For all these reasons and others too obscure to mention, we hope you will agree that it’s time for a change. However, the thought did occur to us that it’s easy to tear down and a lot more difficult to build up, so we racked our brains for going on five minutes and came up with the perfect name for our beloved province. That name, of course, is Cordillera (pronounced core•dill•AIR•uh—please note that of the three accepted English pronunciations this is the only one to enjoy the official endorsement of the CNBNC, core•dill•YAIR•uh being overly faithful to the Spanish original, while core•DILL•er•uh is not nearly faithful enough, not to say unmelodious and just plain silly).
Those of you who are familiar with our landscapes and remember your physical geography will already grasp what a bang-on name that is, semantically speaking. As mentioned above, a cordillera is a series of mountain ranges along with all the stuff in between: the plateaus, valleys, basins, rivers, lakes, and plains. Can anyone out there think of a name that sums up our magnificent province even half as well? Indeed, with the exception of the flattish Peace River country in the northeast—which we’re hoping we can talk Alberta into swapping us the eastern slope of the Rockies for—all of it falls within what Canadian geographers call our country’s “Pacific cordillera.”
“Cordillera”: As lovely a name as a poet could desire
Once again, though, the real clincher, the quality that makes Cordillera such an obvious, such an inevitable choice, is that it just sounds so sweet! Four syllables, with the minor and major accents falling on the first and third syllables, respectively, and as luck would have it on two of the widest, openest vowel sounds the English language has to offer. If you’re a poet or a songwriter, a singer or an orator, it doesn’t get any better than that. You don’t have to take our word for it, either. Just have a listen to the theme song of the Cordillera Campaign. Like what you hear? Then, join us!
Truth be told, the place known as British Columbia is not and never has been either British or Columbian.
It’s true that Britain once laid claim to this far-flung corner of the globe, but it did so for not much more than a decade (1858–1871), or approximately 0.1 percent of the time that the land has been inhabited. The claim was, in any case, more than a little preposterous, considering that when the Brits advanced it they occupied less than five percent of the territory they professed to govern and were outnumbered a hundred to one by its indigenous people.
As for Christopher Columbus, the province’s other ill-conceived namesake, he firmly denied that there could even be such a place. Instead, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, he clung to his stubborn belief that the Atlantic Ocean stretched all the way from Portugal to Japan.
Fortunately, there’s another term for the majestic landscapes that run from the Canadian Rockies to the sea, a term already in use by geographers: Cordillera (core•dill•AIR•uh). According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, a cordillera is “a system or group of parallel mountain ranges together with the intervening plateaus and other features.” Wondering what the “other features” might be? The American Heritage Science Dictionary notes that they “include valleys, basins, rivers, lakes, and plains.” Ring any bells? Here, say we Cordillerans, we have a name that not only suits our province to a tee, but also one that, compared to its current moniker, is easier on the ears and rolls more smoothly off the tongue.
Argument
Now let’s get down to brass tacks and expand a bit on why we take exception to our province’s current name and think we’ve got a better one.
“British Columbia”: A double misnomer
First, we’re not British, although a lot of us do have some British ancestry. Second, we’re not Columbian, although some of us do live on or near the Columbia River. Our beautiful province bears the ill-sounding and unbefitting name it does merely on account of a couple of quirky and ephemeral accidents of history, which if you bear with us we shall recount in some slight detail.
Why is our province called Columbia?
Columbia is a literary name for the lands of the Western Hemisphere–that is, North, Central, and South America and the adjacent islands–based on the fanciful idea that these lands were discovered by Christopher Columbus during his famous voyages of 1492-1504. Today, of course, the Eurocentric presumption that underwrites such notions is painfully clear, and in any case it’s well established that the Norseman Leif Ericson beat Columbus to the punch by about five hundred years. More significantly, the first migrant bands of Asian hunter-gatherers did so at least twelve thousand years earlier still.
Columbus himself did not believe he had discovered anything other than a new route to East Asia, then known as the Indies, for which he mistook the Caribbean and South American lands on which he touched shore. The fact is, he never laid eyes on North America, where the province that bears his name happens to be situated, and if he had he would undoubtedly have mistaken it for China.
Our story now fast-forwards to 1821, the year of the first corporate mega-merger in North America, when the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) absorbed the North West Company and thereby gained a monopoly of the fur trade in the lands falling under its jurisdiction by contract with the Crown. The Columbia District (or Columbia Department) was the name the company then bestowed on a vast stretch of territory running from Fort St. James, near the geographic center of today’s province, to the northern border of California. It was so dubbed after the Columbia River, the major fur-trading route in the district, along which the principal HBC trading post, Fort Vancouver, was located (at the site of what is today Vancouver, Washington). The United States, which disputed the British claim, preferred to call it the Oregon Country.
In 1846, the Treaty of Washington established the 49th parallel as the southern limit of British North America and thus “effectively destroyed the geographical logic of the HBC’s Columbia Department, since the lower Columbia River,” henceforth belonging to the United States, “was the core and lifeline of the system” (Wikipedia).
Why is our province called British?
It is, after all, four times the size of the British Isles and located on the other side of the world. As we’ve already noted, Britain claimed colonial title to its territory for a brief sliver of time—a grand total of thirteen years, from August 2nd, 1858, to July 20th, 1871. As we shall see momentarily, the colony was more notional than real, and the presumptuousness of the British claim is difficult to exaggerate, considering that there were no more than a few hundred Brits living in it at the time of its foundation. They were vastly outnumbered by the thousands of Californians drawn north in the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858, who in turn were outnumbered by the tens of thousands of Aboriginal inhabitants of the land, though the British made no effort to include the First Nations in their censuses.
Indeed, they had no means of doing so, since for practical purposes the writ of the British administration ran no further than southern Vancouver Island, bits of the Lower Mainland along the Fraser and Thompson rivers, and the odd fur-trading post in the interior. The rest of the land making up “British Columbia,” perhaps ninety-five percent of it, continued to be inhabited and effectively governed by its indigenous peoples.
It is true that the Aboriginal population declined precipitously during the brief colonial interlude, largely on account of the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1862–63, while the non-Aboriginal population swelled with immigration from the United States, Canada, Britain, China, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, as of 1870, the year before British Columbia joined Confederation as a province and its colonial status was thereby dissolved, Aboriginals still outnumbered non-Aboriginals by well over two to one (Jean Barman, The West beyond the West, p. 120), most of them living beyond the purview of British authority. Thus, it’s a safe bet that the great majority of inhabitants of the supposed Colony of British Columbia never learned of its existence and would have been bemused or indignant if they had.
It’s all Queen Vicky’s fault!
It was Queen Victoria who came up with the name British Columbia. When the alarming influx of Americans during the gold rush of 1858 persuaded the Brits it was time to lay formal claim to the mainland (Vancouver Island had been designated a colony nine years earlier), her majesty learned that the name Columbia, after the HBC’s Columbia Department, had been proposed for the new colony by its British administrators, themselves largely former officials of the fur-trading company.
A better-informed monarch might have dismissed the suggestion as quaint, nostalgic, and ill-conceived, since, as we have seen, the economically important reaches of the river whose name the department bore had already fallen out of British hands, while the explorer whose name the river bore had been geographically challenged and more than a little pig-headed. Unhappily, no such considerations weighed upon the royal mind. What did trouble Victoria somewhat, however, was her recollection that a name very like Columbia had already been applied to a country somewhere in South America, and so she decided to tack on the adjective “British” to forestall any confusion. Needless to say, the queen never visited the place, nor indeed ever ventured much farther from her palaces than her favorite holiday destination, the European Riviera.
“British Columbia”: A thorn in the side of arts and letters
These, however, are mere historical quibbles. The real problem with Brit•ish Co•lum•bi•a is that it’s such a godawful mouthful, it puts our poets and songwriters at a serious disadvantage. Imagine the pickle poor Gordon Lightfoot would have got himself into if, instead of being “Alberta Bound,” he had set his sights just a tad further west. Put one foot across the continental divide, and all of a sudden he’s got three extra syllables to cram into his song every time he mentions the name of his target province. He mentions it six times, too, in each of the two choruses and five more times in the verses, so you do the math. Not only that, but the vowel sounds that get accented every time a person tries to sing Brit•ish Co•lum•bi•a are particularly short and ugly ones: ih and uh. Take our word for it, the result would be a song not worth singing, not even by Lightfoot, not even in the shower.
“Cordillera”: As fitting a name as a geographer could bestow
For all these reasons and others too obscure to mention, we hope you will agree that it’s time for a change. However, the thought did occur to us that it’s easy to tear down and a lot more difficult to build up, so we racked our brains for going on five minutes and came up with the perfect name for our beloved province. That name, of course, is Cordillera (pronounced core•dill•AIR•uh—please note that of the three accepted English pronunciations this is the only one to enjoy the official endorsement of the CNBNC, core•dill•YAIR•uh being overly faithful to the Spanish original, while core•DILL•er•uh is not nearly faithful enough, not to say unmelodious and just plain silly).
Those of you who are familiar with our landscapes and remember your physical geography will already grasp what a bang-on name that is, semantically speaking. As mentioned above, a cordillera is a series of mountain ranges along with all the stuff in between: the plateaus, valleys, basins, rivers, lakes, and plains. Can anyone out there think of a name that sums up our magnificent province even half as well? Indeed, with the exception of the flattish Peace River country in the northeast—which we’re hoping we can talk Alberta into swapping us the eastern slope of the Rockies for—all of it falls within what Canadian geographers call our country’s “Pacific cordillera.”
“Cordillera”: As lovely a name as a poet could desire
Once again, though, the real clincher, the quality that makes Cordillera such an obvious, such an inevitable choice, is that it just sounds so sweet! Four syllables, with the minor and major accents falling on the first and third syllables, respectively, and as luck would have it on two of the widest, openest vowel sounds the English language has to offer. If you’re a poet or a songwriter, a singer or an orator, it doesn’t get any better than that. You don’t have to take our word for it, either. Just have a listen to the theme song of the Cordillera Campaign. Like what you hear? Then, join us!
Our Theme Song
00:00
00:00
- Cordillera
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Cordillera
Words and music by Peter Brunette
1.
Once an English queen called Victoria
Named a province British Columbia,
But it seems to me that the monarch got it wrong,
’Cause it ain’t all that British any more,
Chris Columbus never came to explore,
And we need a name we can fit into a song.
CHORUS:
Cordillera, Cordillera—
Ancient forests climb her mountain stair.
Cordillera, Cordillera—
Temple of the salmon and the bear.
2.
When the Brits arrived on their sea patrols,
There were cedar logboats and totem poles
Where the great longhouses stood by the salty foam,
Where the people lived in such fine estate
They threw potlatches to celebrate
All the lavishness of the coastline they called home.
CHORUS
3.
Pretty soon there followed from far and wide
The intrepid swell of a human tide
From the Punjab, from East Asia, from the Sudan.
Yes, they came from Latin America,
Even from the proper Colombia,
And they wove their lives in the fabric of the land.
CHORUS
4.
From the Rocky Mountains and Monashees
Down to Haida Guaii and the Salish Sea
Lies a country too majestic to describe.
Now we’ve milled her timber and plucked her fruit,
Let us come together to constitute
The unrivalled paradigm of a rainbow tribe.
CHORUS
Words and music by Peter Brunette
1.
Once an English queen called Victoria
Named a province British Columbia,
But it seems to me that the monarch got it wrong,
’Cause it ain’t all that British any more,
Chris Columbus never came to explore,
And we need a name we can fit into a song.
CHORUS:
Cordillera, Cordillera—
Ancient forests climb her mountain stair.
Cordillera, Cordillera—
Temple of the salmon and the bear.
2.
When the Brits arrived on their sea patrols,
There were cedar logboats and totem poles
Where the great longhouses stood by the salty foam,
Where the people lived in such fine estate
They threw potlatches to celebrate
All the lavishness of the coastline they called home.
CHORUS
3.
Pretty soon there followed from far and wide
The intrepid swell of a human tide
From the Punjab, from East Asia, from the Sudan.
Yes, they came from Latin America,
Even from the proper Colombia,
And they wove their lives in the fabric of the land.
CHORUS
4.
From the Rocky Mountains and Monashees
Down to Haida Guaii and the Salish Sea
Lies a country too majestic to describe.
Now we’ve milled her timber and plucked her fruit,
Let us come together to constitute
The unrivalled paradigm of a rainbow tribe.
CHORUS
Tags: Peter Brunette, Cordillera, Cordillera Campaign, cordillera, British Columbia