What does the word Tatuk mean?
Here's what I was told.
The word Tatuk has roughly two meanings: family and indomitable spirit.
Years ago the founder of TatukGIS visited Tatuk Lake in Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Canada and thought it was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
At about the same time his child started talking and was speaking the usual first words of children, one of which is usually "daddy". The Polish word for "daddy" is "tatus'".
(As a side note, I notice that a lot of TatukGIS customers mispronounce the word "Tatuk". Listen to the pronunciation of the word "tatus'" in the following Google Translate page and you will never mispronounce it again: http://translate.google.com/#auto/pl/daddy .)
So the connection of family to the word Tatuk is obvious. But the connection of the word Tatuk to "indomitable spirit" is less obvious.
I was told that in the 1950's a series of books about Native Americans fighting cowboys and the US Government became very popular in Poland (if I find out the exact author I will update this article).
[Updated 4/2/2013: GisCafe.com user 'mapprSB' provided the following information about the series of books mentioned above. Thanks mapperSB!
"Hi, I have a friend from Poland, and she was astonished to hear that we Americans didn’t know the stories about Winnetou, her favorite American Indian hero. It turns out that the author was German, and they were either never published here, or only in some very limited way. She’s only in her forties, so the stories have persisted in popularity beyond the 1950′s. She said Winnetou was a favorite with all her friends. There might be a movie in the foreseeable future, I read.
Note the cover in this Wikipedia article: an Apache, shown standing in Eastern mountain forests. Personally I always thought Apaches were in the Southwestern areas, but I know many tribes were forcibly relocated. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnetou"]
These books were popular because they embodied the fighting spirit and the resistance of the Polish people to any army invading their country.
My world history knowledge is not the best. So let's just limit the discussion to the last 100 years.
During World War II Poland was sandwiched between Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, perhaps the most difficult location to be in on the planet during that time.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in WWII the Polish said "Do your worst!" and the Nazis did. Sixteen days after the Nazis invaded, the Soviets invaded from the east and did their worst as well.
After WWII ended, the Allies betrayed Poland and gave control of Poland to the Soviets so that the Allies wouldn't have to deal with the Soviets. All of this after 5.5 million Polish people perished in the war! Poland's difficult Communist period then lasted for the next 45 years until Lech Wałęsa was democratically voted into office.
The plight of the Polish people during WWII mirrored that of the Native American people who were slaughtered by invaders from distant lands and then corralled off to reservations for who knows what purpose.
So, after WWII Polish people became enamored with a series of books about fierce Native Americans fighting for their lives and their lands.
When the founder of TatukGIS visited Tatuk Lake in Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Canada he saw the beauty and felt the quiet power of Canadian First Nation lands and chose the name of that lake for his company.
Tatuk is a Canadian First Nation word. After much research I was unable to find the actual meaning of the word Tatuk. But its meaning to TatukGIS is 'indomitable spirit'. Indomitable means "impossible to subdue or defeat".
Now you know.
