Today’s lucky find from the catalog of Library Archives Canada is a bit of a paradox. The digitized document includes two brief letters, handwritten in Cree syllabics, by a (presumably) monolingual speaker of Cree from northern Manitoba. A rare and precious example of Cree language, independently written.
The letters were written in 1919 at Island Lake by a writer who signs himself “ᐁᑐᐘᐟ ᒣᓱᐣ” (recorded in English as Edward Masson). The file includes translations into English, presumably prepared by a government translator, written in a florid script (a completely different kind of 21st-century challenge for contemporary readers!)
And that’s the paradox: how can something so completely ordinary be so exceedingly rare? And if the content of this correspondence is so mundane, and a government translator was clearly at hand to capably handle interpretation, how could there be so few examples recorded in the official archival catalog of government correspondence? Also: how do we begin to look for more?
I’ll leave the transcription of the syllabics for someone with better reading skills. (Scroll to the bottom to find LAC/BAC cataloging details).
Here are the catalog details from the LAC/BAC Catalog:
