I Lost My Talk

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2007

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Language Context: The Endangered Mi’kmaq Language

The Mi’kmaq people, one of North America’s First Nations, are indigenous to the Atlantic Provinces and Gaspe Peninsula of Canada. As of 2023, 66,748 Mi’kmaq people reside in the region. Of those, only 9,245 speak Mi’kmaq, according to 2021 census data. The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages places Mi’kmaq high on its endangered languages list: It is inconsistently in use, though younger generations do still learn to speak it. This vulnerable language is the “talk” of the poem’s speaker that school and government officials forbade in favor of English.

Mi’kmaq differs from English in several key respects. Some common features of Mi’kmaq include free, rather than fixed, word order. While English sentences rely on word order to convey meaning (“The woman saw the moose on the trail there” carries a different meaning than “The moose saw the woman on the trail there”), Mi’kmaq uses the morphology of verbs to explain subjects and objects. Furthermore, Mi’kmaq nouns are categorized—not by gender, as in languages like French or Spanish—but as either animate or inanimate, which is closely in line with other Algonquian language traditions. This noun typology affects verb forms as well. While a native speaker of both languages (Mi’kmaq and English) would be able to transition from one system to the other without a problem, being forcibly prevented from speaking one’s birth language and made to learn another would come with challenges. This may explain some of the speaker’s sense of vulnerability and powerlessness in “I Lost My Talk.”

The speaker of the poem also feels that she has also lost access to the tradition of oral storytelling. Few written records record Mi’kmaq history; evidence of the use of hieroglyphs and petroglyphs only appears in the 17th century. Thus, as with other oral cultures, the ability to talk is especially crucial in Mi’kmaq communities; storytelling becomes a highly valued medium to share history, myths, and folklore.

Historical Context: Canada’s Residential Schools Program

The Shubenacadie Residential School that Joe refers to in the poem was part of the Canadian residential school system, which was administered by churches from a variety of Christian denominations and funded by the Canadian government’s Indian Affairs department. This specific school operated between 1930 and 1967 in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia. The goal of Canada’s boarding school system was to make Indigenous children assimilate into the dominant European culture of Canada; in the famous words of an American proponent of such schools, they wanted to “kill the Indian in the child.” In the 2008 report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the residential school project was officially labeled an attempt at cultural genocide.

Children at residential schools were forbidden from speaking their birth languages or continuing traditional belief and practices. The punishment for not speaking English was corporal, including beatings and receiving soap in the mouth while being strapped to a chair. Along with punishments, students were forced to do farm labor and did not receive adequate food, living conditions, or academic education. Teachers were encouraged not to show compassion for students taken away from their homes and culture. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that many children died of malnutrition or mistreatment and were buried in unmarked mass graves.

While some families did voluntarily send their children to the residential schools, other children were orphans with no other options, and many were taken against parental orders after laws requiring compulsive attendance were passed. Joe was an orphan; few options besides these church-run organizations existed for children like her at the time.

As a result of their experiences, children who survived these schools lost not only their native languages, but also their sense of identity and confidence. Their relationships with their communities were severed, but anti-Indigenous racism meant they were not ever really accepted into white culture either. “I Lost My Talk” is thus an elegy for lost Mi’kmaq generations.