What's in a name?

"Wanganui" or "Whanganui"? History has dropped the "h".

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t allow this posting by Lew over at Kiwipolitico to pass without comment.

Waxing eloquent on the perfidy of Wanganui’s "grasping settler" community, and its refusal to change the name of their city to "Whanganui", Lew has this to say:

They live here, and they grasp, but generally they make few and feeble attempts to engage with tangata whenua, seeing them as outsiders, as enemies, and as competitors because on some level there is a recognition that they retain a moral claim to resources, discourse and authority. The settlers, despite this recognition, consider that it is their land, and their river and their town, and any arguments or evidence to the contrary are met with hostility and the rhetoric of assimilation.

Mayor Michael Laws:

"Wanganui is not a Maori name. It has assumed an identity, a heritage, a history and a mana of its own."

You’ll go far to find a more convenient statement of revisionist ignorance in NZ identity politics. This forms the sole and entire argument in principle against the name change; it’s been that way for ages, so the word no longer means what it once meant – or more plainly, it’s an old mistake so it’s no longer a mistake. If this were to hold everywhere, then the mis-transliteration or misspelling of any word would necessarily destroy any connection to the original in every case: a patently idiotic idea.

But is it?

Take the name of this blog as a case in point.

The proper noun "Bowalley" is a corruption of another proper noun, "Bewley", which is itself a corruption of the French adjective "beaulieu" meaning "beautiful view", which was transformed into a proper noun by Charles Suisted, the Swedish settler who, having acquired that part of the North Otago coast lying to the north of the Waianakarua River and east of Mt Charles in the 1850s, bestowed this name upon it. When, nearly a century later, the property was purchased by my father, "Beaulieu" was still its name.

By that time, however, the locals, who struggled with the correct French pronunciation of "beaulieu", had taken to referring to the property as either "Bewley" or "Bowalley" (the name given to the road that leads past the farm). Another variant of "Beaulieu" was "Baldie" – which eventually became "The Baldie", signifying the little creek which runs through the property, and empties, via a marshy delta, into the Pacific Ocean at the end of Bowalley Road.

The English-speaking peoples are notorious for this sort of linguistic mutation, it’s what lends such richness and colour to the landscapes in which they settle.

Lew castigates the people of Wanganui for daring to express a preference for the name their forefathers bestowed upon the town. But Michael Laws is right: history has normalised the spelling; "Wanganui" has become the name of the settlement. And yes, of course, we all know it's a corruption of the Maori whanganui – just as "Bewley" is a corruption of Suisted’s "Beaulieu" – but that’s just the way language works, and the way a culture evolves.

What’s more, Ken Mair’s demand that the pre-colonial appellation be restored is, I strongly suspect, part-and-parcel of a much more ambitious plan to reclaim his people’s sovereignty over the entire region. To do that, however, Ken and his people would have to fight the colonial wars of conquest all over again – this time emerging as the winners.

So perhaps the "grasping settlers" Lew condemns are smarter than he is willing to admit. Perhaps they see right through Ken’s seemingly harmless demand that the spelling of the city’s name be changed. Perhaps, by resisting this little challenge today, the Wanganui District Council and its Mayor can avoid resisting much more dangerous challenges tomorrow.