Name of Canada

The Dauphin Map of Canada, c. 1543, showing the areas Cartier visited. Newfoundland is near the upper right; Florida and the Bahamas are at lower left

While a variety of theories have been postulated for the name of Canada, its origin is now accepted as coming from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning 'village' or 'settlement'.[1] In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona.[2] Cartier later used the word Canada to refer not only to that particular village but to the entire area subject to Donnacona (the chief at Stadacona);[2] by 1545, European books and maps had begun referring to this small region along the Saint Lawrence River as Canada.[2]

From the 16th to the early 18th century, Canada referred to the part of New France that lay along the Saint Lawrence River.[3] In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada. These two colonies were collectively named the Canadas until their union as the British Province of Canada in 1841.[4]

Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the legal name for the new country at the London Conference, and the word Dominion was conferred as the country's title.[5] By the 1950s, the term Dominion of Canada was no longer used by the United Kingdom, which considered Canada a "Realm of the Commonwealth".[6][7] The government of Louis St. Laurent ended the practice of using Dominion in the statutes of Canada in 1951.[8][9]

The Canada Act 1982, which brought the constitution of Canada fully under Canadian control, referred only to Canada. Later that year, the name of the national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day.[10] The term Dominion was used to distinguish the federal government from the provinces, though after the Second World War the term federal had replaced dominion.[11]

  1. ^ Olson, James Stuart; Shadle, Robert (1991). Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-313-26257-9.
  2. ^ a b c Rayburn 2001, pp. 14–22.
  3. ^ Magocsi, Paul R. (1999). Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples. University of Toronto Press. p. 1048. ISBN 978-0-8020-2938-6.
  4. ^ "An Act to Re-write the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and for the Government of Canada". J.C. Fisher & W. Kimble. 1841. p. 20.
  5. ^ O'Toole, Roger (2009). "Dominion of the Gods: Religious continuity and change in a Canadian context". In Hvithamar, Annika; Warburg, Margit; Jacobsen, Brian Arly (eds.). Holy Nations and Global Identities: Civil Religion, Nationalism, and Globalisation. Brill. p. 137. ISBN 978-90-04-17828-1.
  6. ^ Morra, Irene (2016). The New Elizabethan Age: Culture, Society and National Identity after World War II. I.B.Tauris. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-85772-867-8.
  7. ^ McIntyre, D. (1998). British Decolonization, 1946–1997: When, Why and How did the British Empire Fall?. British History in Perspective. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 108. ISBN 978-1-349-26922-8.
  8. ^ "November 8, 1951 (21st Parliament, 5th Session)". Canadian Hansard Dataset. Retrieved April 9, 2019.
  9. ^ Bowden, J.W.J. (2015). "'Dominion': A Lament". The Dorchester Review. 5 (2): 58–64.
  10. ^ Buckner, Philip, ed. (2008). Canada and the British Empire. Oxford University Press. pp. 37–40, 56–59, 114, 124–125. ISBN 978-0-19-927164-1.
  11. ^ Courtney, John; Smith, David (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-0-19-533535-4.