Each fall, the Algonquian Conference brings together community members, scholars, and students to share their research related to Indigenous communities speaking languages of the Algonquian family. The Algonquian language family is the largest Native language family in North America, with around 30 different languages. The speakers of these languages live in Canada and the United States, from the Rocky Mountains to the Eastern Seaboard. Topics presented on at the Algonquian Conference include anthropology, archaeology, art, biography, education, ethnography, ethnobotany, folklore, geography, history, language education, linguistics, literature, music, indigenous studies, political science, psychology, religion and sociology. This year’s conference was hosted at the University of Alberta at Edmonton and I (Kristina) was able to attend with David J. Costa and Hunter Thompson Lockwood, linguists working on the Miami-Illinois language at the Myaamia Center.

As an educator, I greatly enjoyed listening to each of the keynote speakers who are all working to bring their communities’ languages into their school systems and into students’ lives. There were also several presentations that discussed further research on the impacts of language learning on young children. I am excited to share what I’ve learned with our education team!

David Costa, Myaamia Center Language Research Office Director, presented on noun gender in Miami-Illinois (read the abstract). This talk focused on what we know about gender (or “animacy,” a concept we’ve written about previously), the problems with the traditional terms “animate” and “inanimate”, and what rules determine which gender a Myaamia noun will belong to.

Hunter Thompson Lockwood, Myaamia Center Language Research Office Project Coordinator, gave two presentations on the same day! His first talk was co-presented with Monica Macaulay and Vivian Nash on relative roots (read their abstract). They examined 40 studies of this topic across 80 years and over a dozen languages and discussed how their results might offer a new direction for defining the category of relative roots. In general, relative roots are hard to define, but Hunter gave it a shot for us. “Relative roots are a piece of a word that, according to some linguists, connect (or ‘relate’) the meaning of the verb to something else in the context, like the eehkw- in eehinki eehkwaapiikaasici ‘that’s as far as it goes’.”

Hunter’s second presentation was about measurement and mathematical terms in Miami-Illinois (read his abstract). He came to this topic at the request of the Myaamia community and education team. One particular challenge his research noted was that several of our French-Illinois language documents predate the implementation of the metric system in France. Fortunately, he has also identified several avenues for further research.

In addition to the presentations, conference attendees had numerous opportunities to socialize and network. One such event was the Conference Banquet held at the Art Gallery of Alberta. As part of the event, we were able to view the exhibition Between Things: Alberta Ceramics. During dinner, the three of us were able to connect with other conference attendees about their work and cooking/baking shows.

Our conference trip ended with a mad dash to our final flight to Cincinnati, but we all arrived home safely. I look forward to learning more at the next Algonquian Conference in October 2024 which will be hosted in Oklahoma City, OK!