On Names and Naming: Reflections on a Day in Waterton Lakes National Park by Hannah Stone

We’d had a full day: a three-hour hike to Bertha Lake (with 1,500 feet of elevation gain), a quick swim in aforementioned lake, whose water was so cold it made my ribcage feel like a soda can on the verge of collapse, class by the shore as my clothes dried in the fleeting afternoon sunshine, and a two-hour hike back down to the trailhead. By then, the afternoon winds were scuffing the lake’s glassy, aqua surface with whitecaps. My classmates and I were tired, but ready for more exploring. Our instructors gave us an hour in Waterton, a touristy hodgepodge of cottages, gift shops, restaurants, and one castle tucked within the folds of the Canadian Rockies. I followed my classmates around for a few minutes, but found myself drawn back to the aqua water and the winds pouring off the lake. I wanted to look more closely at the water from my new shoreline perspective. I also wanted more time with the host of spruce-shrouded mountains watching over the water, their candy-striped strata a testament to a history of dynamic interactions with this place. I set up my blue camp chair near the water’s edge, and quickly, my mind began to swell with questions.

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I came to Conservation Across Boundaries as someone with an academic background in both environmental science and creative writing. I care deeply about the environment and found that my time in the hard sciences equipped me with the information I needed to deepen this care further. However, my first love is writing. I love the magical, elusive process of putting words on a page to create new doorways of experience for myself and my readers. I blend my two fields of study by focusing most of my writing around environmental topics. One of my special topics of interest within the environmental writing space is considering how language influences the way we view ourselves and our world. In Waterton, I quickly put on this lens and began thinking about place names (a recent theme we’ve been talking about in class out here). Waterton is full of names – the town itself, Bertha Lake, and all the surrounding mountains and waters. But how, and why, did Waterton come to be known as it is? What about the mountains, or the castle-like hotel looming over the lake? What history, humanity, prejudice, pain, and people lie beneath the names of these places?

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A brief history of place names in Waterton, Alberta: Waterton Lakes National Park is named after Sir Charles Waterton, a member of England’s Royal Geographical Society, and a man who most likely never walked on Canadian soil. The mountain in front of me used to be called Vimy Peak, after a World War I battle that occurred an ocean away from this place. The castle-like Prince of Wales Hotel was named after Edward, Prince of Wales, who became King Edward III. Yet, no Prince of Wales has ever come to see the lakeside views from the hotel. The tallest mountain in Waterton got its name from the first European to explore these lakes and mountains. Lieutenant Thomas Blakiston named it Mount Blakiston, after himself. The identity of Bertha Lake’s namesake remains unclear. However, these are not the only names these places carry. Millennia before Europeans settlers arrived in North America, tribes in the Blackfeet Confederacy knew the Waterton area as Paahtoomahksikimi, or “a lake built by water from ice.” Mount Blakiston bore names that translated to “Seen-from-Afar Mountain” or “Black Pipe Mountain.” Thanks to the work of Indigenous scholars like Dr. Ninna Piiksii and others, Blackfoot names are regaining their rightful recognition and acknowledgment after centuries of European colonization. The work remains far from over, but even in Waterton, a place so heavily steeped in European place names, there are small signs of change. For example, Vimy Peak recently gained a Blackfoot name to honor a Blackfoot World War I veteran, Joe Crow Chief.

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While my time at the lake left me with more unanswered questions, it also provided some new insights. When I am a visitor in a new place, I think names carry even more significance, often acting as signposts when my navigation is more cerebral than embodied. I don’t need maps to tell me how to move through my home, or a sign telling me what a Tennessee deciduous forest smells like in November. But here in Waterton, I rely more heavily on names to fill in the gaps and offer clues on how to interact with this place. Diving deeper into these names creates a mosaic of history out of a map – rich and layered, tragic and complex. What was once a dot on a map expands. The lake and its mountains watch on, accumulating names like strata. The water shines aqua and the afternoon winds come in, as they always have.