Move over Lower Coxwell, Toronto calls it Emdaabiimok now

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On a beautiful summer day, Emdaabiimok Ave. is a nice place to take the family for a walk or to enjoy a sunset.

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It always has been. You can get a good look at the lake from Emdaabiimok.

Lost? You don’t know where Emdaabiimok is?

Just head south from Coxwell Ave. from Queen St. and you are on Emdaabiimok. I hadn’t heard of it either. Turns out Emdaabiimok is the new name of the street you may know as Lower Coxwell.

“The City of Toronto has renamed Lower Coxwell Ave. to Emdaabiimok Ave.,” said a city news release, adding “this was officially recognized at a renaming ceremony” on Wednesday.

With all of the smoke over the cost overruns of the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square, the furor over the so-called “hate” advertising truck and the case of the guy charged with wielding a knife in a road-rage incident who got fast bail despite being charged with two counts of breaching court conditions, this slipped between the cracks.

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“I was proud to work with local Indigenous leaders to ensure we better recognize and celebrate the rich Indigenous history in Toronto-Danforth and beyond,” said Councillor Paula Fletcher.

Her position is the stretch of road from Queen to Lake Shore Blvd. actually never officially had a name.

“That was orphan street,” she said, adding it only became Lower Coxwell in 2019 and it was always only going to be temporary. “We are not renaming anything. It didn’t have a name.”

To honour Indigenous Peoples’ connection to the waterfront, they collaboratively came up with a “nice name” that even some find difficult to pronounce, but she teased “so is Gloucester St.” and people will “get used to it” just like the word Toronto, which is also an Indigenous name.

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To help with the pronunciation, the city said in its news release that the word “translated from Anishinaabemowin, Emdaabiimok, pronounced Em-DAH-bee-muck, means ‘where the road goes to the water.’”

The City of Toronto said “after extensive consultation, the name was recommended by the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, whose ancestors used this path to access the lake” and “Mayor Olivia Chow, Chief Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Jimmy Dick), local Indigenous leaders, Councillor Fletcher and Councillor (Brad) Bradford were joined by residents and students from nearby schools at the ceremony to celebrate the official renaming.”

Just like that, it was no longer Lower Coxwell and became Emdaabiimok. Fletcher assures no one has to change their address since there are no buildings there.

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“Thank you to the hundreds of residents who wrote the city in support of renaming Lower Coxwell to Emdaabiimok Avenue. Just ahead of National Indigenous Peoples Day, it ensures we better recognize and celebrate the rich Indigenous history in the east end and across the city,” said Fletcher. “It also acknowledges the work we still must do to achieve meaningful reconciliation.”

Fletcher assures this will not one day mean a change for Coxwell, named after a local mill operator from the 1830s. But who knows how far the cancellation of other parts of Toronto will go as some eagerly rewrite its history?

As Brian Lilley has written extensively, there are 60 potential street names the woke crowd find offensive, including Yonge St., so it’s conceivable there will be a day when everything you know about Toronto is erased and replaced. This trend is hard to stop as Daniel Tate found out in trying to change city council’s mind on the Sankofa renaming.

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As Lilley reported, Tate was upset at being called “racist” by Councillor Chris Moise, who also said “I think the real issue here is anti-Black racism. If this was named after another prominent Caucasian, we wouldn’t have this discussion today.”

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Henry Dundas’ relative Jennifer Dundas was also upset at Fletcher, who didn’t take the 30,000-signature petition seriously by saying many signatures were from non-Torontonians.

Renaming Toronto is an emotional and heated subject. Some feel they have been disenfranchised in a “colonial” Canada, while others feel that with the tearing down of the Sir John A. Macdonald statues, renaming of Ryerson University or taking the word pioneer out of Black Creek Pioneer Village there is a malicious campaign to eliminate Canada’s history.

If you look at the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it states a concern “that Indigenous Peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests.”

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UNDRIP also recognizes “the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples which derive from their political, economic and social structures and from their cultures, spiritual traditions, histories and philosophies, especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources.”

But like the land acknowledgements politicians and sports teams do before they move forward with their events or when mayors dress up in Indigenous clothing the way Chow did at the National Indigenous Peoples Day, hollow words about reconciliation or actions like rebranding Coxwell to Emdaabiimok seem like window dressing that may be lauded by the UN, but won’t really help Indigenous people.

That said, whether the street sign says Lower Coxwell or Emdaabiimok, it sure is a pretty spot on a summer day.

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