The Story of Our Lac du Nibiinaabe
The Place we call home...
It all started with a dream...
Like I did as a kid, I had always wanted to live on a lake. So my dear husband built us a lake of our own…
It’s not a very big lake. Truth be told, it’s not a lake at all. It’s a pond. But it smells like a lake. It has fish, frogs, crayfish, occasional ducks, egrets, herons, and critters. Lots of critters. It attracts mink, otters, chipmunks and squirrels, woodchucks, turkeys, and deer for visits, and it calms us like a lake when gentle breezes push its tranquil waters to lap against the dock and rocky shore.
Lac du Nibiinaabe is our family’s personal, private pond lake, and it’s part of our world.
Naming the things that make up our world is extensive. We have a habit of naming almost everything. Our cars, the rooms in our house, the trees, and the gardens on our six acres all have names.
I’ve been thinking about how humans come up with names for our world and what people have called our planet throughout history.
Earth, for instance, has Germanic roots, meaning “dry ground” or “soil.” It seems to have been considered a synonym for Middangeard (i.e., Midgard) or “Middle Earth” or the “Middle World,” which is what ancient Norse people called our world. In this example, the world takes its name from how it is made up or the part we can live on anyway. It has become the predominant name for our planet simply because English has become predominant.
The word “World” has other Germanic roots and means “Age of Man.” We name our world after ourselves since we consider ourselves its principal actors.
In ancient Greece, THE WORLD was called Gaia, after the Greek chthonic, primordial deity whose body forms our world. The Latin cognate was Terra Mater (“Mother Terra” or “Mother Earth”). In most Latin countries, some variant of “terra” is still the name for our world.
And that’s about the limits of my knowledge and research for the names of our world, but I know there must be other names for it out there.
All these naming things make me wonder what others call their worlds and why. I’d mulled over many name suggestions for our lake before we settled on Lac du Nibiinaabe, which takes the French spellings for “lake of” (Lac du) and refers to a Chippewa legend and story about Nibiinaabe (water sprites), a.k.a. mermaids. The words in the name have cultural ties to my heritage since the DNA of my blood reveals Chippewa Indian and Irish ancestry.
It also got me thinking about the story of the name itself. In our world, we’ve given Lac du Nibiinaabe a story, and we believe most names have such stories behind them. There are many facets to that story, and in many cases, there are two sides: the part that’s the “real” true history and the part passed down through our cultural heritage and exchanges as the “learned” history. Sometimes those are the same, sometimes not, and sometimes the cultural story – through no fault of its own fails to get passed down at all.
So, with that opening barrage of my thoughts, what are your thoughts? How do you come up with the names for your world, your things, whatever? Why? Do those names mean anything to you or the people who complete your world as you know it? What do they mean, and why?