Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Quebec

Why is Canada Called Canada?

Before Europeans arrived, the land in North America that would come to make up what is today the second-largest country in the world had many names. Of course it did: it had many different peoples. These peoples lived from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, and many of them didn’t have any practical way to interact with each other. When Jacques Cartier started exploring what would become Quebec in 1535, looking for a sea passage to China, there was no reason to think the land that got in his way had the potential to be one cohesive nation. In a few centuries it would become one, but it took some time. It took a village. Specifically it took the village of Hochelaga to start the newcomers from Europe down the path to coming up with a name for the place. Hochelaga was a fortified Iroquois village that Cartier encountered on the St. Lawrence River. He and his party were greeted warmly by the Iroquois. Cartier named the nearby mountain Mount Royal, or Mont Réal. In