Though we are adding only names for villages and prominent rivers and lakes, we encounter many complications. The foremost difficulty is that there is no comprehensive reference for Alaska Native place names. While Donald Orth's massive Dictionary of Alaska Place Names (1967) is an excellent reference for English names, including those which derive from Native names, it is limited to place names in English, not the more traditional Native names. Some publications document place names for particular languages -- notably Jim Kari's Ahtna Place Names Lists -- but none covers Alaska as a whole. Moreover, for many languages the documentation is obscure and inaccessible.
Even where documentation exists it is not always accurate. For example, the name for the village of Deering appears on Krauss' 1995 Map of the Inuit-Yupik-Aleut World as Ipnaitchiaq. This was corrected for me by Ann Lawrence and Lawrence Kaplan to Ipnatchiaq. Not an easy typo to catch. Then there are the complicated discussions about what constitutes an English vs. Native name. Take the case of Nanwalek, formerly known as English Bay. We choose to list Nanwalek as the Native name and English Bay as the corresponding English name. But in fact the English name of the village was officially changed to Nanwalek in 1991. Thus, Nanwalek is now both the Native and English names. But leaving the former English name on the map gives some connection with the past. A similar situation arises with Sheldon Point, since 1999 known (in both Yup'ik and English) as Nunam Iqua.
The case of Haida Gwaii is trickier. On June 17, 2010 the Canadian Government returned the name Queen Charlotte Islands to the Haida people, who then restored the name Haida Gwaii. But as is clear from the spelling of the name, this is actually an English name which derives from the Haida name spelled (depending on orthographic choice) Xaadláa Gwáayaay. On the map we now use Haida Gwaii as the English name in place of the former Queen Charlotte Islands.
Another difficult choice is how to handle the language family commonly known as Eskimo-Aleut. As I discussed in a previous post, there are some who would like to use the word Inuit as a replacement for Eskimo. This is problematic, since it appears to exclude Yupik, clearly a part of the Eskimo family. On the map we chose to use the hyphenated term Inuit-Yupik in place of Eskimo.
We've come a long way since we started this project three years ago. There is a long list of contributors and collaborators who have helped to improve the map along the way, but a special thanks goes to Jim Kerr at ISER for having the drive and the vision to make this project happen.
