Occasional comment, some from many years cruising the Northwest's Salish Sea, some from random thoughts of what is happening on this fragile earth, our island home, some simply random.
The name Salish (pronounced SAY'-lish) Sea can now be used on maps (and, hopefully, charts) and other materials, the result of being officially adopted this past Thursday by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names. We posted on this blog on November 5th that Washington State, and earlier Canada, had approved the naming of this great body of waters from Olympia north to Canada's Desolation Sound.
Now we can watch NOAA run to update their charts.
The painting (above) by Joel Nakamaru, as reproduced on the Washington Sea Grant calendar, depicts the sea life from orca to oysters in our marine environment.
This is an encore posting from last year's, updated, and now with a closing comment. Many of you commented via email following last year's posting, comments that were reflective, touching, moving, as you remembered the cost of war and your own experiences.
For me, November 11th will always be Remembrance Day. Ninety-one years ago the armistice to "end All Wars" was signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiegne, France, to take effect at eleven o'clock in the morning - "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." Originally known as Armistice Day, it was changed to Veterans' Day here while renamed Remembrance Day in Canada and much of the rest of the British Commonwealth.
During the late '60s, while stationed in Ottawa, Canada, on every November 11th, and as the government's chief press officer (seconded from the Army) I was responsible for co-ordinating media coverage of the observances at the National War Memorial. Dignitaries of every stripe were there, led by the Queen's representative to Canada, the Governor General. Mounted at the cenotaph were four armed sentries and three sentinels – two flag sentinels and one nursing sister – posted at the foot of the cenotaph.
The first year I had this duty the Governor General was Major-General Georges Vanier, a tall, striking figure (he had an artificial leg), a World War I hero and one of Canada's few Victoria Cross recipients, and very much a soldier's soldier. (His son, Jean Vanier, is the founder of L'Arche)
Everywhere you'd see people wearing the red poppy, the symbol of the Day, remembering the fields of poppies that grew in Flanders, Belgium, where so many of the Allied dead are buried, and which inspired the poem, which even today is almost a national treasure in Canada, "In Flanders Field", by Lt.Col. John McCrae, Canadian Field Artillery.
What captured me was the military parade to the memorial. Led by contingents from the Royal Canadian Navy (being the senior service, of course), a Canadian Army regiment (often the Canadian Guards Regiment), the Royal Canadian Air Force, there followed the veterans - - First World War, Second World War, Korea. (Since then vets from Bosnia and Afghanistan no doubt take part.) But the group that moved and cheered the crowds most were the few Boer War vets - - a very few proudly marching, albeit some with canes and crutches, some in wheel chairs pushed by Boy Scouts, some in hospital beds, again with Boy Scouts. Headgear properly worn, medals polished, mustaches waxed.
Each year this contingent grew smaller, until the last year I was there only five Boer War vets made it. And we saluted them, and we cheered them, and we wept.
Whether you call it Armistice, Remembrance, or Veterans' Day, I still wear my red poppy on November 11th, remembering the fallen.
A closing comment.
Together with the US, and over a dozen other NATO countries which together comprise the UN-authorized International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Canada has maintained a strong commitment to the Afghanistan mission with over 23,000 having served there since 2001.Currently, 2,500 Canadians remained deployed in Kandahar province, which has been described by Afghan President Karzai as "the centre of gravity" for his country.This work has regrettably come at a high cost, however, with Canadian military personnel suffering casualty rates the highest in ISAF as a proportion of troops deployed. To date, Canadian fatalities number 135, many from the regiment I first joined in 1951, the 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry based in Alberta, four the sons of former mates I served with in the PPCLI.
The video is by Canadian singer-songwrite Terry Kelly.
The term the Salish Sea was first proposed in 1988 by marine biologist Bert Webber, who recognized the need for a single geographic term that encompassed the entire ecosystem, spanning across the international border. Having a name to identify the entire area calls attention to the trans‐border commonality of water, air, wildlife and history. Rather than being a replacement for any of the existing names, the designation Salish Seais an overlay which includes and unites the established and familiar names of the various water and land bodies (the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, Gulf Islands, San Juan Islands, etc.). The name also pays tribute to the Coast Salish peoples who have inhabited the area since long before Euro‐American explorers first arrived.
On October 30th the Washington State Board on Geographic Names (the folk who decide what to call creeks, mountains and other natural features) named the inland waterways shared by Washington and British Columbia the Salish Sea. The British Columbia government approved the name six days earlier. Of course this still has to be OK’d by the US Board of Geographic Names to make it official and, as Mike Sato, communications director for People for Puget Sound writes, “the real official measure is its adoption into customary usage”.
Many of us have long favored the name Salish Sea, not only because it encompasses the waters that we cruise, not only that it sees all these waters as common body when we look at environmental and pollution issues, but because it simply makes sense to honor the indigenous peoples into whose lands and on whose waters we move.
But all this surfaces (no pun intended) an interesting conundrum: what exactly is Puget Sound? A popular description seems to encompass everything up to the Straits, and perhaps (with a bit of grandiosity) even including the waters up to Anacortes, if not the San Juan Islands, let alone as far north as Bellingham. Caleb Maki, executive secretary of the Washington State Board on Geographic Names, calls this the “Puget Sound Creep”, describing in an earlier email to me that Puget Sound keeps "getting larger and larger."
For the record, officially, Puget Sound starts at that body of salt water lying South of Admiralty Inlet/Possession Sound down to just above Olympia.
So, to now be really politically correct, what about all those titles that identify themselves using the descriptive Puget Sound? As People for Puget Sound’s Mike Sato opines in his blog, “renaming ‘People For the Salish Sea’, ‘Salish Sea Partnership’, ‘Salish Sea Business Journal’? Nah.”
Interesting.
Want to weigh in on this? Just post your comments and let's see where we end up.
Meanwhile, for me, here’s to the Salish Sea, at long last!
("The Salish Sea Map", cartographer Stefan Freelan, WWU, 2009")
Editor's note. Some readers have made comments on earlier blogs, but regretfully, in the editing process they were dropped. If you previously sent a comment but failed to see it, would you please resend? Thank you, and again, my apologies.
