Mill Woods is named for Mill Creek, which crosses Millwoods on its way to the North Saskatchewan River. The name also evokes a pleasant image of peaceful, unhurried country life. Some other place names in Millwoods portray the same mock-pastoralism.
Besides those that fit the mock-rural theme, some Millwoods place names were chosen to honour the area’s past and its location on what was once Native land. Others were chosen to honour Edmontonians from other parts of the city who never even dreamed of the creation of such a large suburban district holding more than 120,000 people.
These various types of names should be treated differently. Elsewhere in the city, such places as McDougall Hill, Connors Hill and Scona Road have been in use for more than a hundred years. It would be contentious to change their names. It is less contentious to change a name that has been in use for a short time or never had an historical basis to start with.
Such is the case of a school named after someone who never even set foot in the building. We saw that with the recent renaming of Dan Knott School, on the south edge of Millwoods. Its new name is Cree - kisêwâtisiwin, which translates as kindness or the act of being kind. The world definitely needs more kindness, and that is part of the reason why few object to the renaming.
As a city naming committee recently pointed out, changing names is a wrench to those who are accustomed to the existing name. However, a name that evokes a feeling of victimization and disempowerment is a constant canker.
Luckily for the city, most place names in Millwoods do not evoke such negative feelings, and some date back almost 50 years. So hopefully the wrenches caused by renaming are the exception and are not to become common practice.
Since the start of the planning of Millwoods, it was known that the suburb would be built on land once earmarked for an Indian reserve. The land had once been promised as a residence for the local First Nations, which had lived in the forests and meadows of Edmonton's southside for decades, when the relatively few whites in the area were living only inside the palisade walls of Fort Edmonton.
But the plan was not pursued to completion - government agents officially dissolved the band in 1889 and the reserve was opened to settlers. But the memory of what might have been was intentionally preserved by the decision to use Cree names and expressions as place names in the Millwoods development.
The name for the neighbourhood of Tipaskan is the Cree word for a reserve, referring to the fact Millwoods is built on the old site of the Papaschase Indian Reserve. The land was set aside but was never fully surveyed before the project was cancelled. Papaschase himself gave up his Treaty Indian status, after the local Indian agent refused to let him sell one of his own horses.
Tawa is a Cree word that translates as “you are welcome,” hopefully not to be assumed to be the sentiment of the Papaschase Band that was dispossessed of its promised land. As helpful as the Natives were toward the wave of arriving fur traders, entrepreneurs and settlers, to think they ever said "you are welcome" to simply come and take over seems a stretch.
The name for the neighbourhood of Kameyosek is the Cree word for something beautiful. Other neighbourhood names are of similar nature. Ekota is a Cree word for special place, while Meyokumin is the Cree word for good water and Meyonohk is from the Cree miyonohk, a good spot.
It is likely that the Papaschase band had a name for the hill at what is now 38th Avenue west of 50th Street. But that old Cree place name has been lost, and the area is now known as Hillview. Being based on local topography, this name is a rarity in Millwoods.
But when it came to naming a park in the Hillview neighbourhood, the people in the city office where places are named got playful. The Charles B. Hill Park is named that not from the hill in the area, the only hill in Millwoods, but from the name of one of the city’s leading child welfare officers in the early 1900s. Charles B. Hill, known as Uncle Charlie, worked in child placement and welfare from 1915 to 1956. So the park near the hill is named after a Hill, not the hill.
The name for one neighbourhood in Millwoods does have local roots. Three generations of the Minchau family farmed the land where the neighbourhood of Minchau stands. August and Caroline Minchau came to Canada from Poland in 1894. Soon after arrival, they bought the farm at a land auction, where land located in the disbanded Papaschase Reserve was put on the auction block.
Another sort of naming is where a place in Millwoods is named after someone who, though they lived elsewhere in the city, are thought to be significant enough to warrant a place somewhere in the city to be named after them. And a place in Millwoods happened to be chosen.
Such is the case with Kiniski Gardens. The neighbourhood’s namesake, Julia Kiniski (1899-1969), was an unsuccessful aldermanic candidate many times and then, finally finding success, was on city council for six years. Born in Poland, she emigrated to Canada in 1912, settling in Chipman northeast of Edmonton. She married and raised a family, then the family moved to Edmonton in 1936. After ten - ten - unsuccessful tries for election, she got in in 1963, becoming the eighth woman to serve in Edmonton’s city hall. In 1920s, part of what is now known as Kiniski Gardens was known as Edmonton Market Gardens, after a vegetable garden on the site, hence that part of the present-day name.
Pollard Meadows is named after Frank Pollard (1872-1924). He and his brother John ran a brickyard in the river valley under the High Level Bridge, from the 1890s to the economic crash of 1913. After the crash, to eke out a living he signed on as a soldier, returning from WWI with serious health problems, from which he died a few years later. Frank’s nephew John Jr. was known as “Red” Pollard. He famously rode the racehorse Seabiscuit to victory in top U.S. races, as portrayed in the 2003 film Seabiscuit.
Sometimes place names connect to other place names, with no connection to the physical attributes of the place being named nor to historical figures. Such is the case with the names of the eight subdivisions that compose Millwoods. Their names were chosen because they have the word mill or wood within them. So we see the subdivisions named Burnewood, Knottwood, Lakewood, Millbourne, Millhurst, Ridgewood, Southwood and Woodvale.
This kind of thing is illusory, as very little of the area of Millwoods is still covered with woods. The mill on the banks of Mill Creek actually ceased operation almost a hundred years before Millwoods was planned.
But now after 50 years, Millwoods, or Mill Woods as it is sometimes spelled, is an established place name. To change the name into something more locally appropriate would be quite a wrench indeed.
If such a renaming is desired, the name Papaschase is the obvious source for a new name. But the same city that thinks it appropriate to use the Cree expression Tawa to name part of a one-time Indian Reserve is not likely to make such a radical wrench, no matter how the new name would reflect the actual early history of this portion of the city.
sources of info for this article: Naming Edmonton from Ada to Zoie;
my own book Old Strathcona Edmonton's Southside Roots
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(originally published in the Millwoods Mosaic September 2023)
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