Available Now! - Traditional Carrier Baby Names Booklet

November 16, 2020

In collaboration with Carrier Elders and knowledge holders, Bill Poser has put together a booklet to help preserve the traditional Carrier naming conventions for babies. For the first time, that booklet is now available for download!

Click here to download your copy today!

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Preserving the Carrier language has been a long-time pursuit of Dr. William (Bill) Poser’s. He has dedicated many years of his life to researching and recording all that he possibly can. One key component of this research has been on naming conventions, which has led to the creation of the Carrier Baby Names booklet. 

In collaboration with many Elders and knowledge holders, Bill has compiled a book of Carrier names that he hopes will help satisfy an appetite for using traditional names.

“The reason I put the book together is that more and more people are interested in going back to traditional names,” says Bill. “People say they’d like to give their baby a Carrier name, they want some help in doing that….”

Losing touch with the traditional naming conventions of Carrier people was just one of the many effects of colonization. As Bill states, the difficulty of researching traditional naming conventions is linked to the fact that due to the arrival of the Catholic Church, the usage of traditional Carrier names stopped almost immediately. However, thanks to the Elders and knowledge holders, Bill has been able to record many of the traditional Carrier names.

“The easy names are the ones from French, as many people have used the names due to the Catholic Church baptizing babies. The other names are the real traditional names… the names that people had prior to the arrival of the Catholic Church, and those are much harder to find. Those names pretty much went out of use immediately. People did not continue to give traditional names in addition to the baptismal names.”

Some French and English names that were given by priests at baptisms were later adapted to sound like Carrier, which you can see in the Baby Names booklet under “borrowed names.” 

Traditional Carrier naming conventions show that a person could have a succession of names throughout their life, which would be determined by key moments through one’s lifetime, such as the situations in which one was born.

“The first name you got would of course be chosen by the parents, and that was often a name based on the circumstances of birth. So you’d get, what are odd-sounding names to non-indigenous people, like ‘at the base of a tree,’ because the mom gave birth at the base of a tree.” 

Later in life, more names may be given to a person, or even taken for themselves.

“You might get another named based on some characteristic… that wouldn’t simply be a nickname but might come to replace your original name. As you get older, a person could also choose their own name, which would often occur in response to something you saw in a meaningful dream or vision.”

Most names are non-gendered and were used for either a man or a woman. However, there are some names specific to women, which end in -nan. This is why there is no list of male-specific names in the Carrier Baby Names booklet. 

There are names you might have heard that are not be listed in this book, to which Bill advises to use caution if you want to use these names for your baby. These names could be ‘uza names, a hereditary chief name in a clan system, and so it is best to determine if that name is an ordinary given name before using it for a baby. It is not appropriate to use a hereditary chief’s name without the permission of the clan leaders. 

Bill’s research is helping to revitalize this tradition that was impacted by colonization. Thanks to the Elders and knowledge holders who shared these Carrier names, and to Bill for sharing his research with us to create this booklet, which is now available for those who want to continue such naming conventions that were nearly lost. 

Click here to download your copy today!

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