Embracing First Nations culture

Bilingual signage now in place at significant Mi’kmaq locations across P.E.I.

Nine new bilingual signs are now guiding travellers on P.E.I. roads to traditional Mi’kmaq places.

L’nuey, pronounced “ULnuay”, is an initiative focused on protecting, preserving and implementing the rights of the Mi’kmaq of P.E.I.

The group unveiled the new roadsigns in time for Aboriginal Awareness Week, May 19-22.

“It’s embracing the culture of the people who were here for at least 12,000 years. So it’s great to see,” said Sean Doke, junior communications officer with L’nuey.

The signs were produced and installed with help from the provincial government and installed in well-travelled areas.

“They’re also places that served a historic significance to the Mi’kmaq in one way or another, whether that be traditional fishing grounds, hunting grounds, campsites, you name it,” said Doke. “It’s a great way for the general pubic to learn a little bit of Mi’kmaq.”

Seeing the bilingual signs appear was rewarding, said Doke, who has Mi’kmaq roots on Lennox Island.

The place name project started back in 2005 at the Mi’kmaq Confederacy.

Historian and archivist Tammy MacDonald started collecting place names while staff members were researching land use and gathering knowledge from elders.

As they worked, interviewers asked for any Mi'kmaq place names on P.E.I. people could remember.

“We also had access to transcriptions of interviews that had taken place with P.E.I. Mi'kmaq elders in the 1990s and interviews with both Acadian and Irish P.E.I. community members in the 1980s and '90s,” said MacDonald in an email. “We were able to find a few more that way.”

The crew also consulted maps, books and other historical documents, said Doke.

In 2007, MacDonald’s team sent a list of more than 200 places to linguist Stephanie Inglis, PhD, director of the Unamaki’k College Kjikeptin Alexander Denny L’nui’sultimkeweyo’kuom (Mi’kmaq Language Lab) at the Cape Breton University.

Many of the place names had several spellings, so Inglis converted them to SmithFrancis orthography, the most common way of spelling out words in the Mi’kmaq language.

“Once the list was completed, it was then shared wth an anthropologist to provide some cultural framework to the final 120 Mi’kmaq place names that were unique to P.E.I. that they’d found,” said Doke.

The names have been used in grade school curricula and other projects as well as the road signs since the list was created.

JASON MALLOY/ THE GUARDIAN Signs have recently been erected at the North River Causeway and eight other locations on P.E.I. as part of an Aboriginal Awareness Week initiative. North River is Nemtaqaq in Mi’kmaq.