From Being Horrible in French to an Expert in Wendat: The long and Winding Road of Becoming a Linguist

I never did well in French in elementary or high school. I was no doubt a source of amusement to my fellow students when I had to say something in French in front of teacher and students. One year I was forced to take a summer course in the language. The main thing I remember from that class was that there were people even worse in the language than I was, something my classmates and my family would not have thought possible.

 Failing French was one reason (along with physics and a few other courses) why I failed grade 11 my first time around. I didn’t have to take French the second time. That helped me pass.

Then there was my Spanish class in first year university. I had to take it as I was an English major (only my first year), and there was a language requirement. I did not want to repeat my disasters in high school French. At first I was close to failing, but wanting to get a decent mark, I worked harder on Spanish than I had ever done in French. In what may have been my last class, the teacher looked in my general direction and said, “Someone here is eating lions.” I reckoned that that was a Spanish expression of sorts. I ended up with the best mark I had ever achieved in a language other than English.

That first year I was very much impressed by my sociology teacher, so I shifted majors. The next year I changed majors again, this time to anthropology, as over the summer I had worked close to a reserve, and wanted to learn more about the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people that I encountered, particularly the language that I heard them speak.

That third year I took a course in Language and Culture. The assignment was worth a lot of marks, so I felt that I had to do something spectacular. I decided that I would so something with the Ojibwe language. I found out that there was an Elder, Fred Wheatley, who was offering a course in the language at what was then called the Indian Friendship Centre – no marks involved, just learning. It ran one night a week for several months. I would write about my learning, both of the language and about the teacher who taught me.

Fred later became a foundational figure in teaching his language at the newly formed department of Native Studies at Trent University, the first in Canada. His teaching style was gentle and good humored, ideal for me. That was in the early 1970s. I still have words he taught me in my memory. 

Over 30 years later, when my wife and I got a rescue dog who was white with black spots, the name Wiikwaas came immediately to mind. It means ‘birch’ in Ojibwe.

Although I can say that I learned well from this kind of teaching, I believe that just as important was something that he said one night.

He talked about his life with his grandmother, who had a profound influence on him. One night he told us that after he left residential school and came to live with her. She said to him, “I hear that you have lost your tongue”, meaning his language. There were tears in his eyes as he uttered those words. That moved me.

When I graduated, I applied to the graduate school at the University of Toronto in Anthropology. As I had expressed my interest in Indigenous languages, I was given a research assistant position with someone who was working on Marius Barbeau’s early 20^th century compilation of the traditional stories, grammar and dictionary of the Wyandot, who spoke a dialect of the Wendat language. What amazed me the most about the material I saw and was working with was the incredibly detailed work has been written by Jesuit missionary-scholars in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. I also learned that Barbeau was recording the last speakers of the language. There were no current speakers of either dialect. This made me think.  If the loss of one speaker was a wound to a language, having no speakers was a major disaster. I had to learn the language.

           Now I did not get along well with the department at that university, so I dropped out of that program, and applied and was accepted into the Anthropology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN). I brought with me the two major sources of the Wendat language.

           As a graduate student in the anthropology of language at M.U.N., I was involved in two tongues that furthered my knowledge of Indigenous languages. I took a one-on-one, ‘you do the research and tell me what you learned’ course in Mi’kmaw from the Chair of the Linguistics Department. My research involved assessing different texts in the language. It expanded my sense of what Algonquian languages (such as my previously learned Ojibwe language) and Indigenous languages in general were like.

           Within my own department, I had exposure to Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit. I worked as a research assistant for Jean Briggs, author of Never in Anger about how the people dealt with emotions, particularly in their language. My work with her entailed studying texts that included ‘terms for emotions’ in the language.

           I would revisit my study of the language 30 some years later with my book White Lies About the Inuit, published in 2008. It included a chapter entitled “Fifty-two Words for Snow”. In it I discussed that the myth of the great number of distinct terms in Inuktitut, 50 or more being popular, while I suggested that there might be only just seven basic root words could be modified in many ways. For example the root word aput ‘snow lying on the ground’, can have some 30 variations.

           At the same time my study of Wendat became more intense. My Master’s thesis, a part of which became in 1978 my first academic publication “Brébeuf’s Presentation of Catholicism in the Huron Language,” University of Ottawa Quarterly 48 (1-2), pp93-115. It would not be my last.

           My later analysis of the 17^th century Huron Carol, which is very, very different from the popular version rewritten in the early 20^th century, makes me a person to contact for choirs wanting to sing the song properly in the original Wendat.

Not wishing to brag (much), in the years 2004 to 2024 I published 10 books on the Wendat language (involving a lot of translation). For several years I was the Tribal Linguist of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, a part time gig involving two weeks of travelling down there to work with them in person

All of this would have been a great surprise to my poor unfortunate French teachers. If any of them are still alive, they would give me a teacher’s stare if I told them about my work as a linguist. A similar reaction would be true of former classmates if I told them about my at high school reunions.