We are proud to be presenting this work in progress as part of CILLDI’s Gala celebrating its 25th year, on 17 July 2024. The text is drawn from the work of the late Donna Paskemin – one of CILLDI’s founders – who recorded the stories from her knowledge keeper father. We’re honoured to be celebrating this milestone in person at the University of Alberta, and to have the opportunity to pay tribute to our dear late friend, whose influence at CILLDI has never waned.
[[Almost all of the work shared here on the Cree Literacy Network is intended to be freely shared for educational purposes. This project, however, is subject to copyright. The blog post itself may be shared, but no individual part of this post is to be shared in any way without written permission.]]
kika-ayâsawi-miyitonâwâw / ᑭᑲ ᐊᔮᓴᐏ ᒦᔨᑐᓈᐚᐤ /
You will pass them on to one another:
Cree Stories of the Horse and Buffalo
Edited and translated by Donna Paskemin
Illustrated by Dawn Marie Marchand
With commentary and glossary by Arden Ogg
êkoni kayâs-âcimowina kêhtê-ayak kâ-kî-pê-âcimostawâcik osk-âya, êkâya ta-kakwê-wanihtât, êkâya ta-kâwi-wani-kiskisit ayisiyiniw, nêhiyaw-ayisiyiniw ôti.
ᐁᑯᓂ ᑲᔮᓵᒋᒧᐏᓇ ᑫᐦᑌ ᐊᔭᐠ ᑳ ᑮ ᐯ ᐋᒋᒧᐢᑕᐚᒋᐠ ᐅᐢᑳᔭ, ᐁᑳᔭ ᑕ ᑲᑵ ᐘᓂᐦᑖᐟ, ᐁᑳᔭ ᑕ ᑳᐏ ᐘᓂ ᑭᐢᑭᓯᐟ ᐊᔨᓯᔨᓂᐤ, ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐘᔨᓯᔨᓂᐤ ᐆᑎ᙮
These are old stories that Elders have been telling the young, so they will not lose them, so the Cree people will not forget them.
As of 12 July 2024, this post includes:
- Commentary (Excerpt)
- Gallery of images (subject to copyright)
- Original text in Cree and English (subject to copyright)
Please check back for updates!
Commentary (Excerpt):
From generation unto generation, nêhiyaw kêhtê-ayak – Plains Cree Elders – were responsible for maintaining and passing on the collective knowledge of their culture and history through storytelling. Their sacred stories – atayohkêwina –reached back to the time of creation and adventures of mythical heroes. Their real-life stories – âcimowina – were just as valuable in building and maintaining common memory. Stories of significant migrations, battles, inter-tribal encounters and personal histories, all helped bind Cree people together as a community.
Maintaining that history meant telling those stories again and again to attentive listeners, not only to retain their currency, but also to ingrain them in the minds of the subsequent generations who would carry them into the future. The stories themselves became roots to an itinerant community.
Before European contact, those who carried this responsibility could not have imagined a time when not just the stories, but the very language in which they were told, would face intentional eradication at the hands of colonization and colonizers. They would have been devastated to imagine their own descendants struggling within Euro-Canadian academic institutions to reclaim the language and history that was their birthright. Nevertheless, in 1999, Donna Paskemin took the responsibility upon herself to bring traditional Cree teaching through storytelling into her Cree language classroom at the University of Alberta.
With the help of her father, Myron, a knowledge keeper and former Chief of Saskatchewan’s Sweetgrass Reserve, Donna set out to demonstrate and document the giving and receiving of protocol as it related to storytelling. Together, they seized the opportunity to teach a small piece of Cree history in an authentically Cree way to students who were already engaged in reclaiming the language and culture that had been stripped away from many of their parents and grandparents through Canada’s Residential School system.
The significance of this small act of reclamation in the classroom was hardly trivial. It was a real-world example of “Indian Control of Indian Education” (as envisioned in Harold Cardinal’s 1970 Red Paper). Donna herself characterized it this way when she made the Cree classroom storytelling the subject of her 1999 M.Ed. thesis, at the University of British Columbia, then published in 2002 in Indigenous Languages across the Community. Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Stabilizing Indigenous Languages(7th, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 11-14, 2000).
It demonstrates exactly the kind of Indigenous teachings, and teaching method that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recognize in 2015 in Call to Action 62:
62. We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, in consultation and collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal peoples, and educators, to:
- Make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students.
- Provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms.
- Provide the necessary funding to Aboriginal schools to utilize Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods in classrooms.
- Establish senior-level positions in government at the assistant deputy minister level or higher dedicated to Aboriginal content in education.
It would take years – and commentary from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – for the value of this work to be appreciated. But Donna was an okihcitâwiskwêw – a Cree warrior woman – and this was no isolated act. In 1999, Donna was also hard at work with fellow language researchers and activists from the Universities of Alberta and Saskatchewan: Heather Blair (Elementary Education), Sally Rice (Linguistics) Priscilla Settee (Indigenous Peoples Program) and Edie Hyggen (Indian Teacher Education Program). Together in 2000, they launched the University of Alberta’s CILLDI program: “Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacies Development Institute,” celebrating its 25th year of service in 2024. Donna’s legacy is still very much felt at CILLDI, but this book, with its full colour illustrations helps to bring that legacy forward into the next 25 years of cultural, historical and linguistic reclamation and revitalization. Because Cree Literacy extends far beyond the reading and writing of words.
