Thesis statement: The Kanien'keha, Mi'kmawi'simk, and Cree Indigenous languages of Canada possess writing systems, grammar, and phonology which reflect the history and culture of their speakers.

Tiohtià:ke/Moniang/Montreal

Since Dawson College is located on unceded traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka, I figured it would be a good idea to start by looking into the language of the people who are native to this land. While the Kanien’kehá:ka (an Iroquois nation) are thought of as the traditional inhabitants of this land, it has also been used by the Algonquian tribes and nations such as the Abenaki and Anishinaabe. The city which is now known as Montreal is traditionally called Tiohtià:ke by the Iroquois, and Moniang by the Algonquins. A reservation located to the South of Montreal, Kahnawà:ke, is one of six recognized Mohawk-speaking communities, among Tyendinaga, Ahkwesáhsne, Wáhta, Ohswé:ken, and Kanehsatà:ke. You can hear how to pronounce the words "Tiohtià:ke" and " Kanien’kehá:ka" at this link, which is to Concordia University's land acknowledgment and which also provided me with the above information.

MLA citation: “Territorial Acknowledgement.” Concordia University, Indigenous Directions Leadership Group, 2017, www.concordia.ca/indigenous/resources/territorial-acknowledgement.html.

Reading the report provided me with some basic knowledge of the linguistic properties of Kanien'keha. Firstly, that it is a tonal language, like Mandarin or Navajo (another American language). It was also decided at this conference that new words would be created according to their description, function, activity, or usage. What this means is that new words will always be based on older words. For example, Kahiatonhkwakwe'ní:io (the word coined for the conference which means vowel) literally translates to "main letter". Another example used in the report references the word for goat, kaia'tákeras, which literally means "it has a smelly body". This is a process of adding affixes onto root words

The report also contains some information about the historical background of the language. Prior to colonization, the language was recorded in pictographs. When religious groups like the Jesuits made contact with the Mohawk people, they transcribed the language using twelve letters of the French alphabet - the same twelve letters which are now part of the standard writing system. I believe this is also why tone is represented by accents - those diacritics are also present in French (although I do not have evidence for this claim).

The standard defined by this conference was based on how Mohawk-speaking Elders were already teaching students. In a lot of indigenous communities, elders have a huge role in decision-making and education, so their authority on this question was respected. The standard established was based on the Elders' way of speaking and writing in Mohawk, and there were some decisions that contradicted the way that younger speakers would speak or write.

Mohawk and "Tenselessness"

MLA citation: Baker, Mark, and Lisa Travis. “Mood as Verbal Definiteness in a ‘Tenseless’ Language.” Natural Language Semantics, vol. 5, no. 3, 1997, pp. 213–269. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23748622.

The next source I found is an academic article that argues that Mohawk uses mood to determine definiteness in its verbs. What this means is that verb conjugations in Mohawk do not actually reference time or tense. There is a loose connection between particular morphemes and past or future tense, but it's not a direct correlation like it is in many Indo-European languages.

This supposed "tenselessness" has been observed by linguists before, but it has been interpreted incorrectly. Benjamin Whorf, an incredibly influential linguist, observed the same thing about Hopi and concluded that Hopis had no sense of time. Of course, the Indigenous people of America are people just like us and do indeed have a sense of time and actually do express it in their language. It's just that the inflectional system of Mohawk and other American languages have a different logic from English and other Indo-European languages. The morphemes that one would expect to reflect tense actually represent mood, or the "actuality" of an event or action. For example, researchers once thought that the wa'- prefix signified a past tense, but upon further research, it is a mood used in performative situations (such as ceremonies) or to indicate that an action has "definitely taken place in the real world" (217). Generally, the times in which you would use such a mood are not when an action is taking place in the future, but this does not mean that wa-' indicates a nonfuture tense. Thus, it is known as the "factual" mode. Furthermore, there are many other modes in Mohawk that indicate varying levels of definiteness, such as the predictive (or "future") mode, for example.

The article is quite lengthy and academic, but I was able to understand the basic premise of what the researchers were trying to discuss from the first few pages.

Mohawk and Reflexives

MLA citation: Bonvillain, Nancy. “Reflexives in Mohawk.” Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 1994, pp. 1–29., doi:10.17161/kwpl.1808.320.

This academic article on Mohawk I found that had to do with Mohawk was one on how Mohawk uses reflexives. Specifically, the two morphemes -atat- (which is reflexive) and -at- (which is semi-reflexive) and their many semantic functions. -atat- as a morpheme can denote that an action is done to oneself, which makes the subject of an action also the agent (these are terms used in semantics, or the linguistic study of meaning). However, the same morpheme is also used when an action denotes a result for the speaker (ex. buying oneself something) or emotional states (ex. liking oneself). -atat- is also a reciprocal morpheme, so it can also be used for non-reciprocal agents, such as in the example of "they two hit themselves". In this case, Mohawk does not distinguish between whether they both hit their own selves, or whether they are hitting each other simply by using this morpheme. To distinguish, speakers can employ the dualic prefix -t- which indicates reciprocity. Mohawk speakers can also use these reflexive morphemes to construct verbs which take on a figurative meaning, such that a phrase literally translated as "punish yourself" conveys a meaning more close to "ask for forgiveness" (7).

What's even more interesting is that the reflexive morpheme -atat- also appears in many kinship terms (i.e. words like "mother", "half-brother", "second cousin", etc.). In Mohawk, kinship terms are all structurally verbs, with a pronominal prefix (a prefix that means something like "me" or "he") plus a verb root and an aspect suffix (a suffix that explains how long an action was performed over time). The elder person in the relationship is the agent while the younger person is the patient of the verb. When the relative age of the people in a relationship is irrelevant, the subjective pronominal is used in either the dual (yaky-) or plural (yakw-) form. When the relationship is reciprocal, the reflexive morpheme is used. For example, when I mention my siblings, I also mention that we are all siblings of one another. This means the relationship is reciprocal and this kinship term would use the -atat- morpheme.

In contrast, the semi-reflexive -at- morpheme is often used in sentences with middle voice (neither passive nor active, where the subject is both the agent and the receiver). It is also used in sentences with similar meanings to ones where a speaker would use the reflexive. This indicates that Mohawk and other Indigenous languages in which we can observe similar constructions, the passive voice and the reflexive are linked in ways they are not in Indo-European languages.

Mi'kmaq and "verbification"

MLA citation: Borden, Lisa Lunney. “The 'Verbification' of Mathematics: Using The Grammatical Structures of Mi'kmaq to Support Student Learning.” For the Learning of Mathematics, vol. 31, no. 3, 2011, pp. 8–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41319601. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.

In this academic article, an elementary school math teacher in Nova Scotia details her strategy for "verbifying" her teachings, based on how verb-oriented the native language, and thus, the culture of her students, is. While she is teaching in English, she adopts an indigenist approach in teaching, that is, one that prioritizes indigenous values over the erasure and replacement of them with colonial ones. Because of their language, her students saw the world as one where things are constantly evolving and interacting with each other and rejected the idea that things are fixed or rigid.

For example, in Mi'kmaq, the way to communicate about the concept of "straightness" is through the word pekaq, which literally means "it goes straight". Whereas in mathematical language, many processes of movement and change are nominalized, meaning these concepts are communicated using nouns. Borden "verbified" her teaching of mathematical concepts by, for example, moving her hand over an edge in order to teach students the word "edge". In order to teach her students about "flatness", a word for which there is no Mi'kmaq translation, she eventually arrived at the definition that flat things are able to "sit still".

While this was not an article by a linguist or even within the field of linguistics, it still helps me to understand the difference between the perspective of an English or any other Indo-European language speaker and a Canadian indigenous language speaker.

Cree: the language of the Ininiwuk

Cree Verb Paradigms

MLA citation: Ellis, C. Douglas. “Cree Verb Paradigms.” International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 37, no. 2, 1971, pp. 76–95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1264642. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.

This academic article (whose writer was from McGill, here in Montreal!) first explains a little bit about Cree's sound system/s, with reference to the different Cree dialects. For instance, Cree does not cluster vowels together like English does in words like "hook" or "queen", where two or more vowels are put together to make a long vowel sound, in these cases. Some dialects of Cree are referred to as n- or l-dialects, because of sounds they may or may not include within their sound system. This article's research is mostly based on l-dialects, specifically Moose Cree, which has retained the /l/ phoneme as a distinct consonant from Proto-Algonquian.

The article then delves into the paradigms of the Cree verb system. A lot of the in-depth information was beyond my level of understanding, but I noticed that Cree has two genders - animate and inanimate. It's important to note here that, in a lot of languages, the grammatical concept we call "gender" has nothing to do with the sociological concept of "gender" in reference to men, women, or others. The ininiw/animate and ciman/inanimate nouns are pluralized differently from one another. There is also the obviative form, which references a noun further from the focus of attention, i.e. "the other men" or ililiwa, and when using this form, nouns do not change whether they are singular or plural.

Cree verbs can be either transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs require a direct object, like the verb "bring" in English. You can't say "I'll bring..." without specifying what you are going to bring. Intransitive verbs do not require this specification, like the verb "eat". You can eat something, but you can also just eat. What Cree does with its transitive and intransitive verbs, is it classifies them further as inanimate and animate intransitive verbs. Animate intransitive verbs inflect the actor, meaning they change depending on the person (first, second or third person) and number (singular or plural) of the person who is doing an action, as well as whether the addressee is included (for example, 'we, but not you'). There is also an "indefinite" actor, similar to "on" in French. With intransitive inanimate verbs, they inflect depending on the number, definiteness, and whether they are proximate or obviative.

Transitive verbs inflect actors similarly to intransitive verbs, but the direct object is also inflected in the verb. Here, the number and proximity are indicated, and there is the option of reflecting something as being "further obviative", as in, removed to another degree from the obviative form. For example, to my understanding, in the sentence, "he went with him to see his brother", the first "he" is proximate, the second is obviative, and the third is further obviative.

There are many more complexities in the inflectional systems of Cree laid out in this article, but I've already written a lot, so I'll leave it at that for now.