Cree Keys
Check this out. Using a Sharpie, I helped customize an existing computer keyboard, using keys that had their original English characters hand-sanded off by Blue Quills' computer dude, Mr. Bob.
As you can see, the keys now have hand-drawn syllabic characters, so we can compose in Cree using a computer. Of course, this requires that the typist (and anyone wanting to read it) has access to a syllabic font for use in Microsoft Word. You can download this for free at a number of sites.
I think I promised before to include samples here, and I will, but I wanted to show off my latest project right away. Makes you realize how much material support there is out there for some languages, and how such supports are so ubiquitous as to be invisible. Call this my little effort to make Cree a teensy bit more visible.
ekosi,
Rick
posted by Rick Harp at 3:39 PM
1 Comments:
Greetings from Winnipeg!
Great keyboard. It's interesting how a seemingly simple thing like the configuration of a computer keyboard actually represents a major obstacle to the survival of a language and, as such, embodies the operation of colonial domination.
I have a question for you: what's the Cree word for "justice"? Or is there one?
Last year, APTN Contact had a special episode set in Saskatoon, I think, addressing police violence and general white-Saskatooner racism towards the Native community, and the question you asked was "how can we find healing?". I remember thinking that the community should perhaps have been looking for justice, not healing - to bring to justice those officers responsible for crimes against the human rights of Native persons. But now I think otherwise.
A friend of mine does research into lands claims processes in B.C. In those processes, First Nations have to approach the Canadian state asking for justice, which to the typical middle-class left-winger sounds perfectly innocuous, congruent with the more general project of seeking "social justice" or even a "just society".
But the Oxford English Dictionary says this about the etymology of the English word for "justice": it's adopted from Old French "justicia" which meant "uprightness, equity, vindication of right, administration of law, jurisdiction, court of justice, infliction of punishment, gallows, judge, etc.".
The first sense to be adopted into English meant "Exercise of authority or power in maintenance of right; vindication of right by assignment of reward or punishment; requital of desert".
And 'maintenance of right' was for most of European history a class privilege: it was the aristocrats, the military and property-owning class, that had rights to maintain, and 'right' in general stood for the whole system of violences and inequalities that made possible the existence of that class.
So is this what First Nations people are asking for when, in the context of lands claims cases, they ask for 'justice'? It's not surprising that oppressed groups, fighting their oppression, are forced to use the terms of the oppressor.
But what word or words in Cree would speak more authentically to the needs of Aboriginal cultural renaissance than this very problematic English word "justice"?
Any thoughts? Or am I way off base?
Chris
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