Urban Native Magazine and Regina Aboriginal Professionals Association have launched a photograph challenge (for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) in honour of National Aboriginal History Month. They’re using the Twitter hashtag #NAHM2015PhotoADay.
Here at the Cree Literacy Network, we’ve decided to play along, by gathering the images suggested – but (with help from Solomon Ratt) captioning them in Cree.
For Day Twelve, the word is community.
mâmawi-ihtâwin / ᒫᒪᐏ ᐃᐦᑖᐏᐣ
Solomon Ratt had to improvise for this term, which we might interpret literally as “where we all exist together”. Another challenging image to capture. For this one, I’m going to turn back to this reminder (prepared by our friend Charlie Lippert) of our wonderful, vast, Cree language continuum, that stretches from the Rockies, to the Bay and right on to Labrador. If I knew how, I would link the friendly smiles of Cree-/Innu-speaking friends who form the Cree Literacy Network community across the whole range.
Another powerful audio “picture” of community comes from the online Linguistic Atlas www.atlas-ling.ca where you can hear speech samples and compare vocabulary from one Cree community to the next.
