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 Sixteen, the word is Pendleton:
nanâtohkitasinâtêsowin [multi-coloured item]
ᓇᓈᑐᐦᑭᑕᓯᓈᑌᓱᐏᐣ
Solomon Ratt improvised to describe the quality that makes Pendleton items so popular in First Nations communities and ceremony, but like most trade names, it doesn’t really need translation.
Thanks to my Paula E. Kirman of radicalcitizenmedia.com for permission to use her photograph of TRC Commissioner Murray Sinclair being honoured and ceremonially wrapped in a Pendleton blanket. Here in Winnipeg at The Forks Market, Nadine McDougall modelled a purple blanket for her wee granddaughter and me just last week.
Thanks also to Lene Antonsen – a Saami-speaking guest of the Computational Workshop for Indigenous Languages at the University of Alberta in Edmonton – for sharing some of her photos of Pendletons from the Royal Alberta Museum.
Finally, thanks to Dorothy Thunder, for letting me take her picture this morning in her office at University of Alberta in Edmonton!
