The Salish What?

You may or may not be familiar with the controversy (which may or may not be much of a controversy, when you get to the bottom of it) over the now official naming of the body of water encompassing the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound as the Salish Sea. The idea, brainchild of retired WWU marine biologist Bert Webber, has been kicking around for thirty years but saw a burst of interest within the past five years or so, leading to its official adoption by the State of Washington and US Boards on Geographic Names.

I was suspicious at first and have resisted applying the monicker in my own references. I dislike stuff that seems to just be made up for the sake of political correctness or some mythical sense of ecological purity, and this smacked of that on the surface... an ahistorical Indian name applied for the purpose of tying together a geographic region as an ecosystem. "Salish Sea, the meaning would be so positive in the sense of all of us working together," said one supporter of the bid. Bah! Positivity, what did that ever get me? I don't want a body of water to be touchy-feely, I just want it to flood and ebb twice a day with moderate predictability.

The reasons opponents have given for their stand against it have been no better, though. "It's just another one of the American efforts to erase the border," says one, an example of "cultural imperialism" stressing words over deeds, though this argument fails to explains exactly how all the things that make a border a border (ie, different taxes, laws, and a bunch of guys in uniform standing along it) are going to be erased by the new name, or how Canadian citizen Webber, the originator of the monicker, fits in to these nefarious plans. Frankly, I got tired of listening to people whining back and forth on the subject these past few years and have just as soon be rid of the whole subject.

But despite all this I kind of like the name itself; it's catchy. And whatever the motives of the people proposing it, I find that it actually does fill something of an important niche in geographic reference to the region. I have in the past found myself casting about for a name for the region roughly covered by the Salish Sea, cobbling together "lower Inside Passage" as a bastardized approximation. It turns out there is a logic to the layout of the sea; there are natural borders at the edges of it, and only notional ones inside it. It comprises the general area of the puddle where we primarily sail, a place that has never really been confined by national boundaries, and now those waters are tied together with a single name instead of a bunch of hyphenated approximations. "It's a silly idea. We have beautiful names," says the same Canadian resister of cultural imperialism as was quoted above. Maybe (although, frankly, I don't think "Strait of Georgia" is anything to write home about), but what you don't have is one name to refer to all of those places together... until now.