Sacred Name Collection — Education

Indigenous languages in this school · in preparation

Kanien'kéha — the Mohawk Language

The language of the Kanien'kehá:ka, the Mohawk people of the Haudenosaunee — carried by the strongest immersion schools of any Indigenous language in eastern Canada.

In preparation — in partnership with the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) people's own speakers. The goal is the whole collection in Kanien'kéha: every book to read and to hear, here and in the school. Nothing is published until they have guided and reviewed it.

The language

Kanien'kéha is a Northern Iroquoian language spoken at Kahnawake and Kanesatake in Quebec, at Akwesasne across the Ontario–Quebec–New York line, and at Tyendinaga, Wahta, and Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario. About 3,500 first-language speakers remain, primarily in Canada. It is written in a Latin orthography whose marks — the long-vowel colon and the glottal marks — are meaningful letters, never decoration.

The Mohawk have not waited for anyone's permission to teach: Kahnawake has taught Kanien'kéha in its schools since 1970 and keeps its own community language law. And in 2023 their own translators completed a full Bible in Kanien'kéha, the fruit of a Mohawk translator's lifetime of work. A people who have done that once are not owed a translation brought to them; they are owed an invitation, and the choice.

In this school

In this school, the place of Kanien'kéha is being prepared on the same terms as the library's: no Mohawk lesson, reader, or word list will be made here until Kanien'kehá:ka educators have guided and reviewed it. When the door opens, it opens whole — every level of learning, to read and to hear, in the school as in the library.

Their own schools and teachers

Learn Kanien'kéha in writing

This room opens first for learning to read and write. Nothing here is ours: the alphabet is the Kanien'kehá:ka's own standard, the lessons are their own centres', and the practice sheet holds only the alphabet's letters, for copying by hand.

The writing

The Kanien'kéha alphabet — the standard letters

The standard Kanien'kéha alphabet, standardized in 1993 and taught by KORLCC in Kahnawà:ke and in Six Nations Polytechnic's Ogwehoweh Languages degree: twelve letters, two nasal-vowel spellings, and two marks.

The letters

The nasal vowels, written with n

The marks

Long vowels are written with the colon after the vowel — a:, e:, i:, o: — and the nasal vowels lengthen the same way in the communities' writing.

In teaching materials a falling or rising accent (à, á) may mark stress; it is a reading aid, not a separate letter.

The 1993 standard lets each community write some sounds as it pronounces them — ts in the east, tsi in the centre, tsy in the west; i or y for the y-sound. The variation stands inside the standard itself.

Practice the characters

Print the practice sheet and copy the characters by hand. The sheet holds only the characters of the chart above — no words, nothing added. Printable practice sheet — the Kanien'kéha alphabet

Learn from their own teachers

The writing is the people's own gift to their learners. The words of the books wait for the partnership.

Hear Kanien'kéha today

These voices are the Kanien'kehá:ka people's own, published by their own teachers and stations. The link takes you to their house; nothing of their voice is copied here.

Recovered reading

One recovered book stands here: the Gospel of Matthew in Kanien’kéha, translated by Chief Joseph Onasakenrat and printed at Montreal in 1880, complete in 28 chapters, in the edition’s own spelling — including its figure “8” for the w-sound. It is the people’s own book, recovered and set here exactly as it was printed — not a Sacred Name edition; the collection’s own edition in this language waits for the partnership. The transcription is a DRAFT: chapters 1–3 have been proofed word by word, chapters 4–28 await collation against the scan images, and the ending of Matthew 1:25 is missing from the source text layer and has not been filled. Read Matthew in Kanien’kéha (1880)

An open invitation

Teachers: if you teach Kanien'kéha — in a community school, an immersion nest, a college, or at a kitchen table — this school asks for your guidance before it makes a single lesson. In this collection the holy names are never invented: what the Creator is called in a language is for its own speakers to give, and the spelling of every text is theirs to settle. Write to the publisher at [email protected].

The doors here are the Mohawk Councils of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake, and the communities' own language institutions — each approached for itself.

To hear it

When Kanien'kéha opens here, it will be heard as well as read — in its own voice, spoken and recorded by Mohawk speakers. Until then this door is silent in Mohawk on purpose: the first voice heard in it should be the people's own.

The other doors

This doorway carries no advertising.