Iroquois Ridge school to be renamed, but Indigenous elders say no need

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Iroquois Ridge, an Oakville, Ont., high school, will undergo a renaming process after an anonymous complaint said that Iroquois is a “colonial settler term for the Haudenosaunee and is seen as a derogatory term and is not respectful of Indigenous peoples,” according to the school board’s summary of the complaint.

But there is still some debate about whether the term “Iroquois” is strictly derogatory, and at least one member of the Haudenosaunee has said that the Indigenous community is “upset” that it wasn’t consulted on the name change.

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On March 6, members of the Halton District School Board approved the start of the renaming process. The board has not identified the person who complained about the school’s name.

At the meeting, there was little debate about whether “Iroquois” is indeed a derogatory term. Tara Connor, the HDSB’s superintendent of education, said at the meeting that “to avoid perpetuating further harm,” the role of trustees was “to not debate or negotiate the current name of the school.”

“It has already been confirmed to be inappropriate,” said Connor. Some say that Iroquois is a name the French used and it translates to snakes.

But Grandmother Renee Thomas-Hill, a Haudenosaunee elder, said that she was told it has a different meaning, that it referred to young men running through a forest bringing a message, “like a bird would bring a message.”

“But other people have given it a derogatory meaning,” she said.

Others have argued that its a phonetic translation of an ancient word referring to “America.”

What debate occurred at the board meeting largely had to do with the financial outlay of $250,000 that would be necessary to fund the change at a time when the board has a $7.7-million deficit. The board members agreed that if Iroquois is indeed derogatory, the school’s name should be changed.

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Xin Yi Zhang, the trustee for Burlington, asked why it’s why so urgent that this be tackled now.

“We have a deficit, so we have a lot of things, very important, we need to do,” he said. “Is it the right time?”

Board members voted nine to two to initiate the process.

Barry Finlay was the founding principal of Iroquois Ridge High School. He told National Post in an interview that the school was named after Lake Iroquois, the prehistoric lake that is now Lake Ontario, and that would have extended up towards the site of the modern-day school.

“(The board of trustees) named it, therefore, Iroquois Ridge, because they felt that that reflected the community in which the new school was going to be located,” Finlay said Monday. “It was not controversial at all…. They really wanted the community to be represented and they felt that, because of the geographical significance of the location and Lake Iroquois, that that was an appropriate name.”

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Jody Harbour, the co-founder of Grandmother’s Voice, an Indigenous cultural organization in Oakville, said many people think of themselves as Iroquois. She does — her father was Cayuga, one of the Indigenous groups that make up the Haudenosaunee. But the Indigenous community’s concern, she said, primarily has to do with the anonymous complaint and that Iroquois people don’t seem to have been consulted before the name change process began.

“Our community is harmed. They’re upset,” said Harbour. “This is policies, procedures, that were ignored.”

There may be some who want the name changed, and others who don’t. “Everyone’s journey is different,” she said.

Both Thomas-Hill and Grandmother Gail Whitlow, another Haudenosaunee elder, said they were surprised when they heard about the potential name change.

“I  would really prefer that they keep their name because that’s history. It talks about the land,” said Thomas-Hill. “When you say Iroquois, because it’s not just one word. It’s a way of life.”

“And it’s a territory as well,” added Whitlow. “We have to really think about everyone that is affected by the change.”

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Harbour said she has spent the last few days discussing the policy, and it feels like Indigenous people have been thrown under the bus, having to discuss or defend a name change they feel they weren’t consulted about, which has been justified in the name of reconciliation. Already, a petition has been started arguing the school should keep its name, because “it reminds us of the sacrifices and resiliency of all Indigenous people and the connection to this beautiful land we call home.”

The board, in its discussions and report, mentioned that it had spoken with “treaty partners” and other Indigenous groups about the name change. But Harbour says nobody seems to know who these groups are, as the board’s treaty partners are the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, an Anishinaabe, not Haudenosaunee nation.

The Haudenosaunee, who live in central Canada and the eastern United States, were originally comprised of five Indigenous groups, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, sometime between the 14th and 17th century. After 1722, the Tuscarora joined the confederacy.

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Jon Parmenter, a historian of North American Indigenous Peoples, particularly the Haudenosaunee, at Cornell University, said the scholarly world has moved away from the term Iroquois, and towards using Haudenosaunee.

The first written mention of Iroquois appeared in the writing of French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who came across a person being tortured, and that prisoner was referred to as “Iroquois.” (At the time, Iroquois was used most likely to refer to Mohawks, the easternmost of the Haudenosaunee)

“It’s French usage of a term that was probably told to them by other Indigenous people. So it’s not an internal ethnonym for the group,” Parmenter explained. “What it exactly means, people have been arguing about for hundreds of years. The general thrust is that it’s derogatory.”

It has only been recently, partly in response to Indigenous activism, that terminology and names have begun to shift within the scholarly world, Parmenter said. Ten or 15 years ago, writers would have said “Iroquois.” Some Haudenosaunee people object particularly to the fact that Iroquois has such a long legacy of being associated with being the enemies of the French and other Indigenous nations.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy did not respond to National Post’s request for comment.

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