lol too idyllic by half the whole point of such changes in bc is confrontation and revanchism and an opportunity to overturn the colonial landscape and smooth ruffled cultural egos and getting even with whitey is very much part of the motive as with chinaman's peak becoming ha ling peak in alberta or various chinaman lakes becoming china lake they don't have problems with anything being called chinatown though and seem intent on popularizing the term for anywhere with some condo residents from hk and a couple of chinese only stores the rationalizations for salish sea included elders talking about how it was the ancient name and the correct name even though it's not only salishan peoples who lived around it nor that that word is a misappropriation of an interior salishan's people to the whole language group so these fictive names haida gwaii is of early ' s or late ' s coinage only are often cultural justapositions to start with in one case sto lo which should be the name of the river it's come into use for a grouping of halkomelem speaking peoples formerly known as the fraser river indians even the term cowdigin cowichan now confined to a certain area of vancouver island applied to all the peoples up to yale my piont being that if they wanted to rename the fraser river they should have thought of that before making fraser river their name in their own language it also doesn't help that the way our languages give names to some kinds of things native languages don't label the landscape in the same way they may name a particular flank or toe of a mountain or for an eddy in the river that has some story attached to it they may not have a name for the adjacent land forms anyway the point of the native name movement is largely to drive white names off the landscape entirely they just don't have enough replacement names to go around and the political inertia is incredible as noted the only reason campbell cut the haida name deal was so he could get them to sign onto an indepednent power proposal for his campaign donors