On "mâtinawêkisikâw" and how to say Saturday in Cree
"Did you know the name for Saturday is mātinawēkisikāw. This term comes from the y dialect. mātinamākīwin is the act of rationing food. sharing, distributing food offering, allotment, distribution, the act of offering or giving.
As the 7 day calendar became popularized amongst the plains a certain day became common. These were the days when the buffalo were gone, the people were starving. On Saturdays food was rationed at the forts.
Ration days were not a thing for northern dialects as the food supply came from other sources. Growing up, I would ask why Saturday was different from the rest of the weeks. If Monday to Friday were the first day to the fifth day, why wasn’t Saturday the sixth day. My th dialect northern people didn’t have an answer. Years later I would realize northern Manitoba people (n dialect) preferred to call Saturday nikotwāsik-kisikāw meaning the sixth day. When I started studying indigenous history in university and discovering how all our indigenous languages were oral languages it all started to make sense. It made sense how aggressive assimilation impacted southern Cree people first before colonial practices were directed to northern people. It made sense how language loss was happening at alarming rates in the south, amongst the y dialect. So in response y dialect speakers pushed back against language loss more aggressively. People in the plains Cree community pioneered the writing system. Many of the terms like mātinawēkisikāw, Saturday, were adopted into the written material.
Northern people, until the 80’s were very much fluent and did not make efforts to write down the language as the plains. Language revitalization efforts started in the 70’s and earlier down south as it became apparent culture loss was taking place.
As Indian control of education came about in the late 70’s all of a sudden there was a demand to teach Cree in schools. The only material available at that time was y dialect material. So certain terms came to me as a student sitting in my classroom like the term for Saturday. Cree class became a thing in my generation, I was about 11 in grade 5 when we had our first class. Older students were never formally introduced to Cree class until this time, everyone learned from everyone else until then, orally. In my northern community, syllabics were common amongst the old people. However, in the 80’s many kids didn’t go to residential school with this movement for Indians to teach their own and community devolution. The 80’s also saw this shift of Indian people taking on their own administrative matters locally.
The rush of Cree materials was abit of a free for all for the most part. Those fortunate enough to have a teacher be trained in standardized writing like SRO produced a generation of students that could read and understand the materials. Some communities if not most communities basically hired fluent speakers and much of the materials taught were either phonetic or a personal style comfortable to the teacher. However, the materials developed in the south would become the norm.
Some of the differences in the material taught in class vs the local terms sometimes confused students but only for a short while. Terms like the months of the year were slightly different. An example is the month of February and March.
Firstly, the months are named after observations taking place in nature. Secondly, months had different names but most folks settled on the most common terms. Up north the eagle didn’t come home until March. The name mikisiwipīsim, eagle moon was March. Down south, where it warms up a month earlier, the eagle arrives in February. For southern Cree, the goose starts to arrive in March which is why it’s called niskipīsim, the goose moon. And by this time I’m sure you realize the goose doesn’t come to northern areas until April.
In education we call this locally adapting the curriculum. You take what’s been produced and make necessary changes to reflect the local needs. This is why it’s important to bridge the gap between young teachers and elders, if you’re fortunate to have elders that still speak. If you don’t, please ensure you provide context to why things are the way they are when you can. Learning about history can be just as fascinating as learning about your own language.
-Simon Bird, Cree language keeper and educator
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