Vancouver Island couple wins battle to get son’s Indigenous name on birth certificate
It only took 13 months of his Campbell River parents’ wrestling with B.C.’s Vital Statistics agency and then finally taking them to court to make it happen.
Smith and Shaw had planned to give λugʷaləs a traditional name since before he was born. Shaw is Wei Wai Kum , Smith is Tsym’syen and Haisla and has been adopted into the Heiltsuk Nation. But on March 3, 2022, they received a letter from Registrar General Jack Shewchuk saying the proposed name contravened the Vital Statistics Agency’s current naming standards which only recognizes the standard letters in the Latin alphabet, the standard set of French characters and the use of apostrophes, periods and hyphens as long as they are not next to each other or lead to confusion in interpretation.
Earlier this year, Vital Statistics contacted the couple’s lawyers to negotiate a solution and avoid taking the issue to court. A deal was worked out that gives λugʷaləs a birth certificate with his full and proper name and Vital Statistics gets six months to roll out a system that allows everyone to use traditional names. If they don’t do that after six months, the couple can take them back to court.
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