© copyright 2009 William Gordon Casselman
Kamik & Their Word Lore
These sturdy kamik or kamiks were made from caribiou leg skins on Baffin Island. Kamik is the word for boots made of caribou or seal skin in one of the Eskimo languages of Canada’s north, namely Inuktitut. In preparation for the boot-making, the caribou skins are scraped with an ulu.
Ulu scraper made of horn kept with its slate underplate Kamik, a word in Inuktitut, one of the Inuit languages of northern America, is a plural form meaning ‘boots.’ The Inuktitut singular is kamak. Thus, while the English form kamiks is used, it is superfluous, being a double plural. Canadians are more familiar with the winter boot word mukluk which is from Yupik, an Alaskan member of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. Maklak in Yupik means ‘seal-skin.’ Mukluk was borrowed first into American English, kamik into Canadian English.
Yupik & Co. Most of the 20,000-strong Yupik people living in Alaska speak fluent Yupik and English. The present Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, is working on fluent English but has so far flubbed the assignment. Smirky Sarah and her Spooky Spouse — yes, they sound like a bad lounge act offering musical stylings at Fred’s Naughty Nightery in beautiful downtown Gnome, Alaska. Oh please, silly nitpickers everywhere, I know the place name is really spelled Noam? No, m’am? Nougham? Nome? Sarah and her tit-sucking ningnong of a hubbie are already amassing a campaign treasury to finance her run in the next American presidential race. I can only speak modestly on behalf of several billion residents of earth who do not want a woman incapable of uttering a coherent paragraph ever to rule our world. Central Siberian Yupik, still spoken by about eight hundred people in Alaska and three hundred in Siberia, is a tongue whose location on two different continents bolsters the anthropological belief that northern aboriginal languages were brought to North America, across the Bering land strait, during migrations from northern Asia. Anthropologists and archaeologists now suggest that these earliest waves of migration occurred between 25,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Mukluk The Yupik word for the bearded seal is maklak and most Yupik boots are made from sealskin, hence mukluk ‘seal boots.’ The world’s largest mukluk sits beside the Alaska Highway, at mile 1317 in the little village of Tok. The word appears in an expression widely used across the Canadian north: “better than a kick in the ass with a frozen mukluk.”
Bear Paw Bear paw is a kind of small snowshoe, whose name was taken from its general shape. The Montagnais or Innu, a Labrador and northern Quebec people, invented the bear paw snowshoe for quiet hunting, walking trap lines and bird-netting. The Innu word for snowshoes is asham and single-bar bear paw snowshoes in Labrador Innu are mashkusham. The earliest French settlers in New France adopted the bear paw during the 17 th century because it was quiet and easy to use after soft snowfalls.
A bear paw snowshoe of wood and babiche made by the Naskapi people, Innu of northern Québec and interior Labrador Snowshoes are made of birch — and tamarack on occasion.
Naskapi In the local Montagnais language, the root phrase for Naskapi was probably something like*unaska·hpi·w meaning ‘ones who live past the horizon,’ so named by the Montagnais because the Naskapi live farther north than the Montagnais. And let us add that their own tribal name for themselves was not given to them by early French explorers, as were Montagnais and Naskapi. They call themselves Nenenot, meaning in Innu ‘this land’s real people.’ One can see roots in that word Nenenot related to other northern words and names. Consider some of these Inuktitut terms such as Nunavut ‘our land’ and nunavun ‘homeland,’ both of which contain nuna ‘land, country, soil.’ Think of inuk ‘person, man, human’ (inu ‘people’ plus the noun suffix /k/ that makes it a singular noun, that is, ‘one person, one human, one man.’) In one northern language, Inuktitut, the plural of inuk is Inuit. The name of the language means ‘the way the people [talk].’
Babiche Snowshoe laces are made of a caribou-hide babiche. If caribou is scarce, sealskin, canvas or rope may be employed. Babiche is what French voyageurs heard when Mi’kmaq hunters showed them how to make snowshoe nets and laces in their early travels. The Mi’kmaq word was aapapiich, literally ‘net string’ but used to name: rawhide lacings, threads, cords and thongs made from untanned caribou or, further south, moose hide. The French heard the moderately plosive Mi’kmaq /p/ sounds as French /b/ sounds, hence babiche.
Snowshoe Vocabulary of Labrador Innu The excellent material below (slightly edited by me) is the work of curators, researchers and Innu interviewees presented in more detail at www.virtualmuseum.ca If you are interested in Canadian history, do not miss a perusal of this excellent new resource site. Eight types of snowshoes were made and used by Labrador Innu. Note that the second component of most of these compound words is asham Innu ‘snowshoes.’ ushetusham – swallow-tail snowshoe So don those kamik, Canucks. In cold snow, tip-toe can lead to nip-toe and then to frosted-toe and soon to gangrene-toe and thence to surgical excision of said toe. Yikes! Bundle those footsies, gang.
© 2009 William Gordon Casselman
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