PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Mi’kmaq language keepers John Dennis and Maynard Marshall meet every Tuesday at the tribal elder house to teach their skills, especially to other tribe members, hoping to keep this part of their culture alive.
Some participants bring their babies to the class so they can hear the language being spoken, and they all take what they have learned back to their own households.
Teachers tried to instill the Mi’kmaq language and keep it flowing so it wouldn’t be lost when Dennis was growing up in Nova Scotia, he said. That desire for preservation prompted Bangor High School to pilot a Native language course this spring. School officials chose Dennis to teach the course and hope one day to include it as a regular offering.
Mi’kmaq language revitalization efforts like this one aim to preserve Native culture and identity. Traditionally the Mi’kmaq language was learned at home, spoken among the family members, Dennis said. But today, Native languages in North and Central America are slowly dying because there aren’t many people speaking the languages and passing them on to the younger generation.
“[For] myself as a teacher, to go to each and every home is difficult, so why not have the people come here and they can take the language home?” said Dennis, who has been teaching Mi’kmaq since 2009.
The four languages of Maine’s Wabanaki tribes are Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Penobscot and Passamaquoddy, and have not been taught in public schools, only at tribal schools in Penobscot and Passamaquoddy areas, Dennis said. One reason is that public schools don’t have room for it in their budgets, and European languages like French or German get more of a priority.
“Because this is a mother tongue language, we learn from our mothers, and so a lot of our elders learned the language at home and not at school,” Dennis said.
He and Marshall started the local community language class this winter. Each week they dedicate one hour to language used in family settings and another to conversational words encountered in community settings. Mi’kmaq Health Center staff also receive weekly language lessons.
Sometimes class participants play a game by saying the first Mi’kmaq words that come to their minds. When someone enters the class, people use the Mi’kmaq phrase for “come in.” The lessons are structured not just to teach vocabulary, but to help people use the Mi’kmaq language in conversation.
Dennis received a master’s degree in elementary education from the University of Maine in 2016, and this year earned a master’s degree in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“[Linguistics] taught me how to teach language from a broader perspective when you’re talking about tense and negation,” Dennis said. “You are talking about different phrases that you would not hear in normal conversation.”
For instance, the Mi’kmaq word for phone is “majtaqte’magan,” a word describing something that is used to tap, which dates back to Morse code. The word describes what a telegraph key does, which today is similar to people tapping on smartphones.
There are English words that don’t translate into Mi’kmaq. “Miclish” is a term for using English mixed with Mi’kmaq words, and is one way of speaking the language and integrating it into daily life. For example, there are no Mi’kmaq words for the English word “computer” because the Mi’kmaq language is descriptive.
The language can be learned separately, but getting to know the Mi’kmaq culture will help the language come to life.
“It’s using the language on a daily basis, and it’s using what you know so that it won’t be lost again,” Dennis said. “That is what we are trying to achieve here.”