Funny thing about meeting people when walking a dog is that people ask the dog's name not yours. There are several people that I have only met up with a few times where I still don't know the owner's name. With other dog owners whom I meet often, we have exchanged our names. And as we have taken the opportunity to have the dogs walk together rather than just play together, I am getting to know them as well.

Learning new people's names can be a challenge. If I am not careful, the name enters my mind and leaves again. I need to hook it for it to stay. I learned that if I say the name three times during the initial meeting, I'll hold onto it. As I don't use names during a conversation the way some people do, this requires attention and an extra effort. But it is worth it when the name is remembered.

These days I am wondering how to learn the names of mushrooms. Beyond puffballs, I am stumped. And there is a huge variety of them, types I have never seen before in our yard and in the forests where I walk. Not that I am tempted to eat them--you really have to know your stuff to forage mushrooms--but I am curious. I was already curious about the shapes and colours, but I am reading Finding the Mother Tree in which Suzanne Simard talks about the role of fungi in the life of trees.

In contrast, the names of places seem to stick in my brain. Maybe its because when we drive, the names of places are announced by sign posts. I can name every town on the roads to Toronto that I usually take.

There are a couple place names that others know and I don't. There is no sign for Hoggs Corner, for example, even though it is used as a landmark by people who have lived between Owen Sound and Wiarton for a long time. And I remember when in Hanover, it was common for people to use the Kaufman Factory when giving directions even though when I moved here said factory was a vacant lot. The name stuck so deeply that the space is now a park that bears that name.

Given that place names stick, given that human beings name places, why did Captain Owen think that the bay he sailed into was his to name? There were already people here, both Ojibway and Metis. Did he not know that they would have a way of referring not only to their villages but also to the body of water? Did he not think to ask what they called the place?

Mountains, rivers, lakes all had names so that the people who had lived here for centuries could share information about these places. But explorers seemed to think that until Europeans knew of a place, it was not known. Many put their name on a mountain, a river, a settlement, ignoring the names already given.

I am glad that we are at this moment in time recovering the older name for the bay where Owen Sound sits. It was a good decision to name the new bridge Gitche Namewikwedong, Great Sturgeon Bay. The reconciliation garden also bears this name, and it now has a stunning statue of a sturgeon. Honouring this name recognizes that there was a history in this place before contact.

There are hints of older names in our country. Adawa is an Algonquin word meaning to trade and is the origin for the name of the Ottawa river and our capital. Toronto comes from a Haudenosaunee word having to do with fishing. But so many explorers plunked their name on places they went to, ignoring the history that existed before they came.

Names of places do change. Kitchener was called Berlin until the First World War. Now, there is some challenge to that name as the general the town was named for established concentration camps during the Boer War. And Ryerson University is committed to finding a new name because the man it is named after had a prominent role in starting the residential school system.

Place names matter. They honour history. The question we need to keep in mind is whose history is marked with the names we choose.

Cathy Hird lives on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway