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Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Territory and Language Map

by stepmr on 7/17/15, 3:28 PM with 7 comments

  • by stepmr on 7/17/15, 9:43 PM

    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-...

  • by abruzzi on 7/17/15, 6:36 PM

    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

  • by marquis on 7/17/15, 9:11 PM

    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.

  • by s_q_b on 7/17/15, 6:25 PM

    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.