i am really really angry, WARNING: may be offensive (RANT)

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ok, so i am not white, im Native Aboriginal of Canada (Mi'kmac) and i have always been curious of my history, what my people were like before settlers arrived, and how 'civilized' we were.

i school, all i heard was that we were uncivilized people living in tee-pees and was just barely surviving on the land, and that we were saved when white people came and taught us how to build houses. i asked my dad about this and unfortunately most of it is not true. he was chief of the reserve i used to live on at the time, and was learning a lot about Mi'kmac spirituality himself, what he learned is that Tee-Pees were not really our only housing type, we also had Longhouses. and that we were not barely surviving, we were thriving on the systems we had, and community worked well together, Family was very important, and staying in contact with the tribe was important too. the fact "all tribes got along" is actually a myth, there was rivalry and still is today. however the fact of how in touch of nature we were was true too, if you are going to take a life you have to return something of value (which was usually sage or tobacco) and we never took what we didnt need.

all this being learnt, i wanted to read more on the internet, but found: nothing! even today i found some information on M'kmac Hieroglyphs only to find out later that catholic priests actually organized and gave them meaning (all catholic meaning).

i also wanted to know my language, i know a few words ( Midada (my grandfather), Migajoo (my grandmother), Sogi (aunt),) but thats it, also a few food names i know but cannot spell. i felt really sad that i LIVE in canada, (where my people originated) and i AM a native Canadian, but i am learning English and French which dont even orginate in CANADA!! !

What happen to "when in rome do as the romans?"

at the moment there is a series of protests happening against Fracking (( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing )). recently, about a few years, the canadian government decided to start fracking in NB, which is extremely harmful to the environment, it is in our spirituality and belief that we MUST protect the Environment, so a lot of natives are protesting against it and i CANT BELEIVE THE RACISM I AM HEARING! its unbelievable, saying that fracking will open more jobs for people and that natives dont understand because they live off the goverments charity.

very very angry

sorry for the rant,

It's good to get things off your chest. I also remember learning about the longhouses and the way the system worked for the natives. I've also learned about the different foods that your ancestors prepared and cooked. I also made bannock once for my Grade 11 Social Studies class and again for my family. I also made myself a paddle and a kapok in Grade 11.

Feel free to rant whenever you wish. That's what WP is for.

I did some searching for a fellow Sonic fan.

http://www.native-languages.org/mikmaq.htm

That's the best source I could I find. It seems there are plenty of old books on the language but they would likely be very hard or impossible to get, not to mention expensive.

As for Fracking, people will say whatever they need to get what they want. Anyone who lives in areas of fracking is almost always against it, but just as in this case, they'll be ignored or talked down. It's really unfortunate.

It may seem unfair that you're speaking languages which were the languages of invading people, but if you go back far enough, English and French were probably originally spoken by just a few people in England and France, and those people took over and invaded and destroyed all of the other languages in England and France, so even most English and French people probably don't speak their families' original languages.

I'm American but the attitude & stuff you hear regarding your tribe & other natives is similar to the American attitude towards the Native American Indians. The western movies are even worse because they portray the Indians as savages who have raids to scalp heads of white men & kidnap white women. The reality is that the Indians were doing great before the whites came who gave them blankets with diseases, cut down lots of trees, & killed lots of animals that that were a large part of the Indian culture.

I'm against fracking too because of the environmental issues & belive more jobs would be created if we focus on green energy projects instead.

its not the same thing,

if you go to china, you HAVE to speak chinese in order to get by and live there

if you go to Africa, you have to learn african language depending on where you go in africa.

if you go to france you have to learn french if your going to live there.

its not fair that everyone else was able to speak theyre own language in theyre own country except us.

It is absolutely the same thing.

Every little group had their own language. Then they went around having battles and killing off all of the people who spoke differently and converting them to speaking the dominant languages.

"English" is not the language of all English-speaking people. It's not even the language of all English people. It's the language of a particular group of people who went around killing everyone who refused to speak it and converted everyone to their language. Eventually, all that most people in England knew was that their parents and grandparents spoke English, and they started to see it as theirs, but it originated somewhere, and it probably was not the "mother tongue" of most of the people who see it as their native language.

You used Chinese as an example, and China is a great example of what I'm saying. Mandarin, the dominant language, is by no means the only language spoken in China. There are quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

But Mandarin became dominant by people being absorbed into the group who saw it as theirs.

The same is true with the various African languages.

I really doubt that most people, even most people who grew up speaking the most dominant languages, even people whose ancestors mostly lived in areas where those languages were spoken, have ancestors whose first language was the language they currently consider their "mother tongue". And I would expect that if you go back far enough that the languages first spoken by your first speaking ancestors were probably not the same as the language that you consider your "mother tongue". Your real "mother tongue" was probably killed off by the people who speak the language you consider yours.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6- ... erica.html

There are often concepts which are untranslatable across a language barrier, so that you lose more than just a different
way of saying things, when you lose a language. You lose ways of perceiving.

Last edited by Stannis on 01 Mar 2014, 4:24 am, edited 2 times in total.

Well, technically, your REAL mother tongue is whatever language YOU the individual speak natively, regardless of what language your ancestors may or may not have spoken....even children of immigrants or children adopted to other countries would have a different native tongue than those of their parents.

I guess the OP is lamenting the loss of the original language of his ancestors, though clearly English is his native tongue. And I guess the fact that the extinct language was supplanted by a European language rather than another indigenous tribe's language is also part of his consternation.

if your saying Mi'kmac was killed by Mi'kmac people

then this is the ignorance im talking about.

every hear of "residential schools?"

the residential schools of canada were held by the churches to civilize and tame "indians" of canada. there were all over canada, and was a great example of the corruption of the native mind.

children who attended did not go by choice, it was a law that if a native spoke theyre tribal language, and followed theyre native spirituality they must attend the Residential schools.

The residential schools inforced and drilled English, french and Catholicism into the minds, stealing the identities of thousands of children. The children lived there for 12 years never seeing theyre families again. it wasnt uncommon for the children to be beaten, raped and starved. the children were fed a porridge daily and nothing more. the children were convinced that theyre ancestors were rotting in hell because they were native. the last school closed in 1996

many Native people who are in prisons today are Residential school survivors. my dad has unfortunately worked with them.

the goverment has actually apologized numerous times>


WE LOST OUR LANGUAGE BECAUSE WHITE PEOPLE TOOK IT! Mi'kmaq isn't even a name, it means 'my kin friends'. in quebec theres another name for the Mi'kmac people, i cant remember the word but the translation is "smile at nothing" which doesn't mean a serious people, it means were always smiling, were happy and laugh at everything.

luckily, the language isn't 100% gone, 11000 of approximately 40000 speak the language, my grandfather can speak it, my great grandfather and grandmother can. my aunts can.

living in NB canada is see a lot of bilingualism. but don't understand why settlers didn't just learn our language and our spirituality, it wasn't primitive, or uncultured. i want to know where i came from, and i feel that opportunity should be available to me.

No, I am not saying that the Mi'kmac language was killed by the Mi'kmac people.

What I am saying is that the people who originated the Mi'kmac language were not necessarily your direct ancestors, but that your ancestors likely became part of the Mi'kmac people and whatever languages your ancestors may have originally spoken were extinguished. In fact, in your family history there are probably many many languages which could have been considered to be "your language".

I am not saying that the Mi'kmac language was extinguished by choice. The things done to the native peoples of this continent(some of whom were some of my own ancestors, as has been verified by DNA test) were terrible. I am very familiar with the schools set up by the Canadian and U.S. governments. In the U.S. they were called "Indian Schools". Taking children away from their parents and abusing them is horrible.

My primary ancestry is European, but I don't consider English to be "my" language. It's likely that my own ancestors had their own languages, but that my ancestors moved into different areas, interbred with other people, had wars, were invaded, had their languages snuffed out, et cetera, and this all has probably happened many many many times.

There is nothing wrong with valuing the language that your family values, but there are probably a lot more languages in your history that you don't know about and never will, and the fact that you value it does not mean that it is the language your ancestors first spoke. The language you value was just the language that won among your familial group. Hundreds of years from now, your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren may feel that English is their language, and some other country may come in and force them to speak a different language, and they may resent that, too.

But don't hate all white people for what some white people did. There are a lot of "white" people whose families spoke one particular language and who were invaded by another white group and who had their own languages extinguished.

It may be easier to understand what I'm saying if you think about religion, which spread the same way. It's very strange that the religion of some people in the middle east became the dominant religion in Great Britain. I don't believe that Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed came from London. The people in Great Britain probably had some beliefs about the origins of the world before they'd heard of Christianity, but those were extinguished by the outsiders who brought Christianity. Now people in Great Britain feel ties to Christianity even though it's not their ancestors' religion, and even though their early ancestors probably hated Christianity when they first heard about it.

To play devil's advocate, in that scenario, the conquered group would more readily assimilate with the conquering culture, seeing as they're all white people. I think race does play a part in the OP's case as the Mi'kmac are still very much aware to this day that they're a conquered people. (Though the Mi'kmac do have a lot more European admixture than the tribes found out west).



Well, I think it first becoming the dominant religion of the greatest empire in the world at the time helped. Especially seeing that empire ruled over territory in both the Middle East and Great Britain.

Incidentally, why don't you consider English your native tongue? Regardless of your ancestry or whom spoke what generations ago, you, personally, speak English. How is it not your mother tongue?