Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Territory and Language Map | Hacker News Reader

Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Territory and Language Map

native-land.ca

44 pointsstepmr7 comments

If anyone is interested in learning more about contemporary Indigenous issues in Canada (from a "Canadian" point of view) I can recommend a few good places to start:

I'd recommend reading both of John Ralston Saul's books on the subject: "A Fair Country"[1], and "The Comeback"[2].

A couple weeks ago I posted "Title Fight"[3] by Arno Kopecky, which is a fascinating read, and an excellent intro to "Aboriginal Title Land".

Maclean's Magazine also published a great article on Canada's deep/pervasive "Race Problem", I'd recommend reading this first.[4]

[1] http://www.amazon.ca/Fair-Country-Telling-Truths-Canada/dp/0... [2] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Comeback-Aboriginals-Reclaiming-Inf... [3] http://thewalrus.ca/title-fight/ [4] http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/out-of-sight-out-of-mind-...

Also, shameless plug here, my wife and I are working on an Indigenous-centric social news project called Makook. We're about about a month from launching a beta, but we're sending out a weekly news digest that covers trending Indigenous stories and ideas in the meantime. If anyone is interested, you can signup at http://makook.com

Splash page is very attractive! Are you two curating stories and aggregating them into a big topical feed, or doing content generation yourselves?

Best of luck on your upcoming launch!

I've never really looked closely, but in the Athabaskan area you see two red blobs when you turn on languages. These are "Dene" languages. Dene I believe refers to themselves. In the American southwest the Navajo call themselves "Dine" which means "the people". My understanding is The Navajo and the Athabascans languages are closely related, but I'd love to know more on that relationship and why there is such a geographical gap. The map here is pretty evocative:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabaskan_languages

Yes, they're related in a well-established family. [0] gives a good view of the family tree.

And the reason they're so far apart is that they must have migrated there from the north. From Wikipedia [1]:

> The Apachean languages, of which Navajo is one, are thought to have arrived in the American Southwest from the north by 1500 CE, probably passing through Alberta and Wyoming.[14][15] Archeological finds considered to be proto-Navaho have been located in the far northern New Mexico around the La Plata, Animas and Pine rivers, dating to around 1500. In 1936 linguist Edward Sapir showed how the arrival of the Navajo people in the new arid climate among the corn agriculturalists of the Pueblo area was reflected in their language by tracing the changing meanings of words from proto-Athabaskan to Navaho. For example the word dè: which in proto-Athabaskan meant "horn" and "dipper made from animal horn" in Navaho came to mean "gourd" or "dipper made from gourd". Likewise the proto-Athabaskan word ɫ-yáxs "snow lies on the ground" in Navaho became sàs "corn lies on the ground". Similarly, the Navaho word for "corn" is nà:-dą: derived from two proto-Athabascan roots meaning "enemy" and "food", suggesting that the Navaho originally considered corn to be "food of the enemy" when they first arrived among the pueblo people.

[0] http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/nava1243 [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language#History

I recently spent a while in the Squamish area and became fascinated by first-nations linguistics and writing processes. Very interesting stuff, coming from a native latin/germanic perspective where pronunciation is not implicit e.g in the word 'Sḵwx̱wú7mesh' the '7' is a glottal stop. Compare this to a word, say, 'gezellig' in Nederlands, where the opening g is glottal but not denoted in writing.

Fascinating. Much like South America, large parts of the country are dominated by the remaining natives. An estimated 75% of non-Indigenous Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border.

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