Cree dictionary 25 years in the making

The cover of the Alberta Elders' Cree Dictionary features a painting by artist and U of A alumnus Jane Ash Poitras

"When a language dies, a nation dies."

So begins the forward to the Alberta Elders' Cree Dictionary. Only a few decades ago, Cree was in danger of extinction after many residential schools forbid its use. Today, however, young people in Canada's Cree community are trying to rediscover their linguistic heritage. About 25,000 people across the country now speak Cree in varying degrees of fluency.

The Cree people in northern Alberta are the largest aboriginal language group in the province. This latest dictionary just released by U of A Press, although certainly not the first published repository of Cree, may go a long way to preserving and expanding one of Canada's oldest tongues, says editor and religious studies professor, Dr. Earle Waugh.

"We hope that it will kick-start a kind of formal educational policy, that it will become a standard language learned in Alberta," says Waugh. "Eventually I would hope whites as well as Cree would find this a wonderful language to learn. It's wonderfully explicit - it depicts things in pictures. What Cree tries to do is give you a kind of snapshot of something."

Waugh began overseeing the project 25 years ago at the instigation of Sister Nancy LeClaire, a Samson Cree from Hobbema who had a passion for keeping her language alive. When she died in 1986, after getting as far as the letter "N" of the Cree/English section, Waugh asked elder George Cardinal, now 78, to finish LeClaire's work and translate most of the English dictionary into Cree.

Growing up in a small northern Alberta community called Wabasca, Cardinal managed to escape the scourge of residential schools. In fact he was taught Cree by a Catholic priest who learned the language to help young Cree preserve their culture.

Cardinal hadn't spoken Cree on a regular basis for years when he joined Waugh's team. The elder jumped at the chance to help out, "for one simple reason," he says. "I was going to help out with my native culture." He was also aided by a number of Cree students from the U of A, including Ray Cardinal, Nicole Martell, Lorna L'Hirondelle and Sage Cardinal.

Using Father Albert Lacombe's Dictionnarie de la Langue Crise as a place to begin, Leclaire had originally incorporated a combination of five dialects in compiling the dictionary's words and phrases, although most entries are drawn from the Northern and Plains variations.

Since more recent words and expressions are not yet written in stone, Cardinal openly admits to improvising. Take 'video lottery terminal,' for instance. " I had to describe it as 'a machine that spits out money,'" says Cardinal. "But somebody told me it doesn't always spit out money." He laughs: "Maybe it would have been better if I said, 'The machine that takes all the money.'"

Another example is 'cell-phone.' Cree translation: "Speech that you pack around with you."

The dictionary includes about 22 different words for snow and 13 words for moose - reflecting the experience of northern communities - but only one word for car, literally translated as "stinking machine." Distinctions between types of vehicles don't exist, at least not yet.

As with any language, the structure of Cree reflects the way its people see the world. "Cree is non-gendered," says Waugh, "so you don't say, 'he sits down, or she sits down.' Basically you say, 'a person sits down'.In effect Cree is quite up to date in terms of its gender consciousness. Conceptually it doesn't sit the same in their culture the way it does for us, because [with English] the relationships between sexes has been culturally fixed by the Christian context."

There is also no word for guilt in Cree. "Legal people asked us to consider the problems that this raised," says Waugh. "Because the whole concept of guilt in the Western legal tradition comes out of Christian notions of the soul."

To get around this sticky problem, Waugh includes a legal oath in an appendix. To plead guilty, a Cree speaker would say, "niyakatotaman," which means "I am responsible for doing it." Not exactly the same thing, but arguably in the ballpark.

With any project of this size and scope, however, and whenever one is dealing with a living language, there will inevitably be the odd errors, omissions and controversial translations. Waugh therefore welcomes input from the Cree people for subsequent additions. He is already planning a multimedia CD-ROM as a companion to the dictionary. All royalties from the projects will go towards Cree educational programs.

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