Learning to write like ᒣᐃᓔ

I met a friend’s nieces on the weekend; they were visiting Montréal with their parents and attended a brunch held by Sh’s former roommate. Neat family: their mom is a francophone from Gaspésie, their dad is from México, and they’re living in a small native community on the shores of James Bay where the parents work as health practitioners and the children attend a bilingual English-Cree school. It was very interesting to hear about the collision between the Cree way of life and the massive sums of money the Québec government throws at those communities in return for flooding all their land with hydroelectric dams.

But we were all most impressed with the children; at ages 5 and 8 they’re already fluent in French, Spanish, English, and Cree, and the older girl can read and write in each of those as well. We asked her to write out her name in Cree syllabics, and she patiently wrote out ᒣᐃᓔ for us. I suspect she gets asked that a lot by her parent’s friends when she visits the city.

Anyways, they were neat kids.