From Sakaw to Ceremony: How Edmonton Is Learning to Receive a Name

There's a neighbourhood in west Edmonton called Lewis Farms. Drive through it on any given morning and you'll pass the construction site on Rosenthal Way NW for what will eventually be one of the largest recreation centres in the city; twin arenas, a 50-metre pool, a library, a district park. It's a significant piece of civic infrastructure, built on land that sits at the western edge of the city, adjacent to Enoch Cree Nation territory.

The neighbourhood carrying the Lewis name doesn't raise many eyebrows. Ernie Lewis (1903 - 1987) was a farmer. The land was his and that's how naming worked for most of Edmonton's history. The name goes to whichever settler owned the land, or built the building, or sat on the right committee.

But that's not how the recreation centre will be named.

In a piece I wrote for Active History last year, I traced a particular pattern in Edmonton's naming history. In 1974, City Council named a neighbourhood in southeast Edmonton "Sakaw" — a Cree word meaning "wooded area." The rationale, as recorded in City Council minutes, was that the area had once been part of the Papaschase First Nation reserve before it was taken. Naming a small residential neighbourhood in Cree felt, to the committee, like a form of honour.

It wasn't. The land had been stolen as a consequence of actions taken by John Oliver. Nobody from Papaschase was consulted. The name was applied by settlers, to stolen land, as a way of feeling better about it. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call this a "settler move to innocence", a gesture that is a shallow mimic to reconciliation without requiring settlers to give anything up, least of all the land itself.

That pattern persisted in Edmonton naming for decades. Indigenous words appeared as street and neighbourhood names, assigned without consultation, sometimes without accurate translation, serving mostly to give places an ambient sense of Indigenous connection that cost nothing and changed nothing.

But something has shifted.

In June 2021, Edmonton City Council voted unanimously to remove Bishop Vital Grandin's name from the downtown LRT station. Grandin was an architect of the residential school system, a man whose explicit goal was the destruction of Indigenous language, culture, and family. His name had been on a station since 1989, accompanied by a celebratory mural. While Council voted to remove the name Grandin in 2021, the work to educate citizens on the role Grandin played in residential schools began years prior.

The harder part, and the more interesting part, was what came next. A renaming process was initiated, led not by the Naming Committee working through its usual channels, but by the Indigenous Relation Office working with Indigenous peoples themselves. The process was grounded in ceremony. Elders and Knowledge Keepers were the decision-makers. The name that emerged from that process has not yet been publicly released, because it belongs to that process — it will be released when the time is right.

That's a fundamentally different thing from Sakaw.

The same is true of the Lewis Farms recreation centre. The name for that facility has been gifted through a ceremony involving Elders from Enoch Cree Nation. It involved sweats, a Pipe Ceremony and formal protocol. Again, the name itself is not mine to share here — it belongs to the people who gave it, and it will be shared on their terms.

What I can say is this: in both cases, the dynamic has been inverted. The City is not naming. The City is receiving. That distinction matters more than any particular word on any particular sign.

I want to be careful not to oversell this. The shift from unilateral settler naming to ceremony-based, Indigenous-led gifting is real and significant. But it has happened through a series of individual processes, each process ad hoc, each dependent on the relationships and political will present at that moment.

There is still no policy mechanism that brings Knowledge Keepers and Elders into the naming framework itself. Edmonton has Memoranda of Understanding with the Confederacy of Treaty Six Nations and Otipemisiwak Métis Government, and those MOUs create relational obligations that the city is genuinely trying to honour. But when it comes to naming policy — the actual bylaws and procedures that govern how places get named — there is no formal, consistent pathway for Treaty Six Nations and other Indigenous Peoples to shape that policy alongside the City.

What we have instead are good processes and good relationships, project by project. That's better than nothing. It's considerably better than 1974. But it means the progress is fragile and dependent on the people in the room and the goodwill of any given council, rather than embedded in the policy architecture of the city itself.

Place names are infrastructure. They're repeated hundreds of times a day without thought, on bus routes, in conversation, in the mouths of children learning where they live. When those names are gifts, received through ceremony from the peoples whose territory this is, they carry a different kind of weight. They don't resolve the history. They don't give back what was taken. But they signal something true about who is being listened to, and how.

Edmonton is learning to receive a name. The next step is building the policy that makes that possible every time, not just when the circumstances are right.