Preserving the 'language of Canada'
Mi'kmaq rarely spoken by younger generation
BRIAN FLINN
http://www.hfxnews.ca/index.cfm?sid=52012&sc=89
Mi'kmaq has somehow survived repeated attempts to wipe it out. But despite current efforts to keep it alive, the only language to ever arise from Nova Scotia's forests, rivers and coast is in trouble.
Many young people whose parents speak Mi'kmaq have switched to English and French. And that generation is the only thing keeping it from joining the 13 aboriginal languages currently listed as endangered.
"It is the language of Canada itself," said Eskasoni resident Joel Denny. "There should be a law in protecting the language in Canada."
Statistics Canada says Mi'kmaq is the sixth most widely spoken of Canada's 50 aboriginal languages, with almost 9,000 reporting they understood it in 2001. That's remarkable, considering the Mi'kmaq might have been the first aboriginal people in Canada to encounter Europeans. They were almost killed off by imported disease and state-sponsored murder. The government in Halifax put a bounty on the head of all Mi'kmaq men, women and children in the 1750s.
In mainland Nova Scotia, Mi'kmaq never recovered from the period in the mid-20th century, when aboriginal children throughout Canada were taken from their families and forced into residential schools.
The language is more widely spoken in eastern New Brunswick and the Gaspe. Cape Breton is home to most of the people who speak Mi'kmaq as a first language.
The biggest concentration of Mi'kmaq speakers is in Eskasoni, 40 kilometres southwest of Sydney. The largest aboriginal community in Atlantic Canada, it's built on the side of a hill that reaches deep into Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes.
Denny believes isolation helped the language survive in his community. But technology is making distance less of a barrier. TV, computers and video games speak English and French to children. Denny said many don't want to use Mi'kmaq, and he fears they are losing their culture.
"We don't need government and non-native people to come in and kill us off now," said Denny, whose family is a noted group of Mi'kmaq dancers. "We're doing that to ourselves."
Many of Nova Scotia's Mi'kmaq bands are trying to reverse the trend by introducing more Mi'kmaq language instruction into reserve schools. Denny isn't convinced it's working. Increasingly, Mi'kmaq is becoming a second language.
Governments have done much to eradicate native languages. Today, they fund Mi'kmaq education programs. But there is no publicly supported organization advocating for preservation of the language, like the province's new Office of Gaelic Affairs. And aboriginal languages don't enjoy official status in Canada, like English and French.
Denny, 55, avoided residential school while his parents struggled to protect him from the authorities. He recalls hiding in a tree while the RCMP and an Indian agent grabbed two of his friends for forced education in English.
Assimilation wasn't always so deliberate. Europeans brought disease, which killed thousands of people. They also brought technology that forever changed the province's ecology.
Memories of the lost way of life are contained in the Mi'kmaq language. Caribou - kalibu - is a Mi'kmaq word. The province's last caribou was shot in 1921. Walrus lived in the inland sea around Eskasoni and along the Nova Scotia coast. They were finally hunted out in the late 1800s.
Denny said the Mi'kmaq were a winter people, like the Inuit of northern Canada. Inuktitut and Mi'kmaq have an almost identical word for a boat with a skin stretched over it, which helped people travel and hunt in cold months. In Denny's language it's ka'ak - or kayak. Toboggan is a Mi'kmaq word.
English is a collection of words borrowed from Latin, French, German and just about every language that encountered the British Empire. The original meaning of words is usually obscure.
Anna Nibby Woods, a Mi'kmaq master's student at Mount Saint Vincent University, said people who grew up with an aboriginal language find it difficult to express themselves in English. They find English words are inadequate, because they have little relationship with other words, or with the environment.
The Mi'kmaq words for headache and the cure for headache are related to the word for a plant that cures headaches, she said. In English, there is nothing in common between the words "headache" and "aspirin."
Denny said he has been studying Mi'kmaq for 20 years, collecting old songs and figures of speech. He's convinced it originates from the sounds heard in the environment, and is vital to understanding the environment. The meaning of words is embedded in those sounds."When you talk Mi'kmaq, you talk feelings, you talk description, you talk what happened and what's going to happen," Denny said. "We don't name stuff. We describe stuff."
The word for skunk, abigjilu, literally means "an animal that steps backward and farts." That's useful information if you ever encounter one.
"When he's stepping backwards, get out of the way," Denny laughs. "You know damn well he's going to fart on you."
Other words are filled with traditional values. Woman, or e'pit, means "she carries the egg within." It's a constant reminder of her reproductive role. Man, ji'nm, means "he carries the great life force." Denny said a father is one responsible for passing on that life force.
The maternal grandmother, kukmijinu, is the traditionally most important figure in a child's upbringing. She "put the egg within" the child's mother.
"There's no good or bad in Mi'kmaq. There's just consequences," Nibby Woods said. "Everything is interconnected and interrelated. That's why there is respect for everyone around you."
Woods spoke Mi'kmaq before she went to residential school in Shubenacadie. She recalls later asking her grandmother to teach her the language. Her grandmother refused. She said it would only be a burden. As today, employment opportunities were in English.
Woods got an education in English and had a career in advertising, before rediscovering her Mi'kmaq heritage in her mid 30s.
Teaching Mi'kmaq as a second language has some value, she said, but it's not the same as having it as a mother tongue.
"It's kind of like a novelty thing, because you're not thinking in Mi'kmaq, you're not dreaming in Mi'kmaq," she said. "You're translating for Mi'kmaq."
Like many people who speak Nova Scotia's native language, Joel Denny bristles at the word "Mi'kmaq." He finds himself saying it, but the first time Denny remembers being identified with that word was 1973, when he was in his early 20s.
Mi'kmaq means "friend" or "ally." It's the word Acadians adopted to describe their relationship with the native people.
"There's no such thing as a nation of friends," Denny said.
The word preferred by many Mi'kmaq speakers is "Lnu." It sounds almost the same as the word "Innu," used by native people in Labrador and eastern Quebec, and "Inuit," used by people in the Arctic. And it means the same thing: human.
Here are some other words in Nova Scotia's native language:
Springtime: siwkw, "time of draining out."
Summer: nipk, "the time when everything turns green."
Autumn: toqwa'q, "cold weather has arrived."
Winter: kesik "the slippery time."
Skunk: abigjilu "an animal that steps backward and farts."
Caribou: kalibu "an animal that scrapes snow."
Dog: imu'j "an animal that howls"
Wolf: paqtesm "an animal that's echoing all over the place."
Halifax: Jipugtug (often Anglicized as Chebucto) "the greatest harbour."
Cape Breton: Unamagi, usually translated as "foggy land," Denny says it actually means "land of the white dolphin."
(Spelling from various sources. Definitions from Joel Denny).
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