In the spirit of the last post, nêhiyawêtân!, I have been trying to be more consistent with my use of Cree at home. In order to do this, I’m focusing on certain periods of the day to really get the vocabulary down. My goal is to become more used to Read more…
Before I had children, the plan was that I would be a fluent speaker of Cree so that I could teach it to my children. How hard could it be? I already knew some Cree, and I’d learned to speak Spanish fluently in a short period of time without intensive Read more…
My last post was about what non-natives learn about us, and thus how we are portrayed by them. I suppose this post is about what we learn (and teach) about ourselves. Pan-Indianism If you’ve ever been to an urban ceremony, you are probably used to hearing about the medicine wheel, Read more…
In Quebec, I’ve come to realise, “Métis” still means “half-breed” to most. If you identify as Métis, people will ask which of your parents is an Indian. At first I used to go into this long explanation about the genesis of the Métis, and how the founders of my community Read more…
I talk about language a lot, so it is not strange that on various occasions people have brought up the issue of language as power. This has happened enough times that I’ve given it a fair amount of thought, without necessarily having resolved any of the issues. Most of us Read more…