Papers of the Thirty-Sixth Algonquian Conference

John Steckley teaches in the Human Studies Program at Humber College in
Toronto. He is the author of Beyond Their Years: Five Native Women’s
Stories.

The 34th and 36th Algonquian Conferences were held in 2002 and 2004,
respectively. This academic institution provides opportunities for
beginning and well-established scholars alike to present papers on
diverse subjects related to Algonquian-speaking people. Most of the
papers are linguistic in nature. There is no questioning the
professionalism and linguistic techno-wizardry of the authors; however,
the vast majority of the linguistic articles are so esoteric that they
provide no joy for non-linguists, and little joy for linguists who study
other language families. There is a need for terms such as
Apluractionality and Amirativity to be defined somewhere.

Still, reading these collections is like panning for gold. There are
treasures to be found, linguistic and non-linguistic. The linguistic
treasures involve what can be called works of linguistic archaeology, in
which manuscripts written in rarely or even never-before-recorded
languages are discussed. Particularly significant from the 34th
conference proceedings are two studies of 18th-century documents (Ives
Goddard’s look at the possible attestation of the otherwise
undocumented Mascouten, and David Pentland’s identification of Cree
r-dialect of Missinipi), and Alan Corbiere’s interesting discussion of
how Ojibwa speakers on Manitoulin Island used literacy in their language
from 1823 to 1910. The non-linguistic gold includes a personal and
powerful piece written by Wendy Geniusz about the Anishinaabe medicine
woman/ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay and the continuation of Regna
Darnell’s important work on shifting residence patterns of Algonquian
peoples in the London, Ontario, area.

The already hard-working editors need to do more work to make these
volumes more attractive to a wider audience. They need to write
introductions that help explain the articles to the readers. Otherwise,
they should force their writers to explain the terms they use, as they
would if they were teaching a class. The editors might group together
the collection in several sections based on related linguistic themes
(e.g., Algonquian preverbs), and have a general introduction to each
section explaining more basically what the theme is and why the paper is
significant. Finally, French abstracts for English papers about
Algonquian people living in Quebec, and English abstracts for French
papers, would be a welcome addition.