This section is written with a great deal of humility and ongoing reflection over the years. This process will continue. Please accept these notes as time-specific and unfinished. They reflect my own limited perspectives and search for meaning among the fragments of language received and the cultures of sharing language experienced.

The Mi'kmaq language is a dynamic and changing landscape of learning, growing, and creativity. The use of language in this book reflects this flexibility and appreciation for different dialects and individual forms and is decidedly non-dogmatic.

We ask your patience and forgiveness, if necessary, particularly during our era of language recovery and revival. We live in fascinating times when knowledge can be shared, and pan-Indigenous notions can be transmitted across vast distances. Living in Australia and learning language is certainly case in point. Dynamics of international marriages and relations of trade and commerce are part and parcel of our deep history also. Our native language reflects this.

The Mi'kmaq language grows from the roots of Algonquian linguistics and is kin with Cree, Deleware, and Ojibway (MRC 2017). Our nation sustains an oral tradition that was first recorded on stone and birch bark fragments in the form of pictorial representations. Hieroglyph and petroglyph writing developed out of the same spirit of creativity. The former grew particularly during early colonial encounter with Franciscan missions leading to prayers and scriptural texts translated into pictographs (Whitehead 1988).

During the 1970s the Francis Smith orthography added a new layer of clarity. Based on a phonemic principle and rooted in the early dictionaries of the 1800s the system is used widely today. But not consistently nor universally. Different dialects have existed throughout history, also true today even with the advent of distance communications. Certainly, language thrives where both consistency and diversity intersect and generate new forms of thinking and expression.

Two Spirit studies inspires the need to gather the Medicine Bundle of language. This is a brief and incomplete first impression gathered over ten years. We leave a comprehensive study to the younger generation of Two Spirit scholars and practitioners with more knowledge of these things.

Linguistically speaking, digging our-selves out of the Euro-centric flatland materialistic reductive gendered and racist worldview demands first appreciating Mi'kmaw wholistic cosmology as the basis of language and human relations. Notice we do not first say the need for understanding Mi'kmaw gendered relations. In fact, the vast majority of words and phrases in Mi'kmaq are non-gendered implying both/and rather than either/or. To prove this for yourself read a dictionary. A general verb-based emphasis on action is applied to any or all genders. This itself is fascinating because English places great emphasis on the noun.

Rather, in Mi'kmaq, people are described in pragmatic ways. For example, 'the chases men' is one of my favourites. Manly men and womanly women appear descriptively in the language around what they do and what function roles. Men with men, and women tied to everyday tasks and with women with women, women with men, described as who they are because of what people do in kindness or mistake. You may not find the emphasis is on what people do in colonial or culturally exposed settings, and if someone is described at all in colonial or culturally exposed settings, it is very briefly. Humility and propriety govern much of Mi'kmaw relations within and outside culture.

If during the colonial encounter gender tended to be 'hidden' among the Mi'kmaq (though gender as such cannot be viewed as a native concept per se, which technically is true when we study the colonial definitions of gendered roles in European cultures), how much more would a Mi'kmaq non-gendered, dual-gendered, or trans-gendered Two Spirit identity be hidden or remain simply not articulated? Indeed, many aspects of life are not raised or written because they simply do not become important in the culture until the colonial cultural clash demands self-examination, response, or resistance.

There is a poetry of being in the Puoinaq tradition. This is often referred to as shape-shifting. But part of this reality is the multi-dimension or many-meanings of being Two Spirit. This flexible description can apparently abide in any or all of the above dimensions of gender and relationship. One does not need be gay or lesbian in terms of sexual behaviour to be Two Spirit or a Puoinaq or both. This description can seemingly shape shift as well, i.e., more from being with male or female, appearing as male or female, and/or taking on the spirit-energy of totemic creatures, and/or taking on the more esoteric layers and personas of a Medicine Keeper, Pipe Carrier, Healer, or Seer.

While these insights arise from cultural learning, listening to elders, sitting with kin, and exploring sociological, psychological, and ethnographic reflections these insights also come from sitting with the Medicine bundle of language fragments.

Having not grown up with language, each word can take years of exploring, asking questions, listening to stories, and reflecting on meanings. Several off-reservation kin have told me that for this very reason we who have lived highly respectful to say of my desire to preserve and pass on knowledge, I would not come to the same conclusion as on reserve and off reserve is so unique for each person. Many regardless our background end up carrying these sacred medicines with great care and devotion.

Sitting with reserve-based grandmothers and fathers, cousins, aunts, and uncles, brothers and sisters, allows sharing stories and medicines. Anyone who studies Mi'kmaw language forms and culture will agree. This journey is incredibly rich from all sides given the depth and creativity of native associations, meanings, cosmology, science, poetry, and story.

Culturally speaking, in language we begin with Niskam, Great Spirit, who creates the cosmos and nurtures among the Old Ones of the People mediators and teachers in community that carry Sacred Medicines of knowledge systems, values, connections, methods or skills. The Puoinaq are said to carry enormous powers of precognition, intuition, insight, wisdom, dream-knowledge, animal-knowledge, and ecological environmental-knowledge. We are said to live in deep ecology, deep connection within all of creation. We are able to communicate and travel between the Six Worlds comprising Earth, Sky, Water, Under Earth/Water, Above Sky, and Stars or Ancestral World or the Summer Lands. Puoinaq as a word with its own history may or may not be linked or tied to notions of Two Spirit, or of spiritual power and identity variance. This connection may be contemporary.

Like Elder Dr Paul suggests, the links are plausible when we consider the broad values and intentions of the language and culture. Also, there appears to be layers of story that associate identity variance with the Puoinaq. We may not go so far as to say gender variance, or sexual difference. In so far as these latter concepts are highly charged by Eurocentric histories and colonial cultural origins.

But suffice it to say, if we had to stretch so far, we may admit that variance in identity could potentially in any given Mi'kmaw context include a person whose Puoinaq ways expressed or overlooked gender variance and/or sexual difference. In other words, a focus on who a person is remains less important than what that person does for family, tribe, and nation. Puoinaq in this sense is a person of power for the people. The word is associated with the action of a range of talents, perhaps including keeping family histories and marriages, healing arts, teaching, medicine keeping, herbalism, mysticism, spiritual vision, connection with spirits, etc... How we serve and how we belong are the key concepts.

Personal layers of identity are only relevant when they are relevant, which is hardly ever in the sense that they may indeed never be spoken or written in this worldview. Rather, you may say yah well Tom chases men and he keeps the medicines. Go to Tom for the herbs you need. Oh yeah, Tom lives with Fred. They been together many years.

These kinds of connections may always have been or may be a contemporary acknowledgement of a layer of culture that has always been. Sometimes a people find obvious what was not quite clearly spoken before. But makes complete sense. I do not know if this is the case here. Not being dogmatic about history and tradition, my focus is on what people believe now, today, and how this helps people become stronger in good human values of kindness.

But the truth is that we can clearly say that Puoinaq is a word that was marginalised during colonisation and under Christian influence and was during a certain timeframe became associated with sorcery and witchcraft. This knowledge came to me late in this study and was quite a shock and surprise. In my innocent explorations this connection to European witch hunts and prejudice toward the arts and sciences of healing never occurred to me. This more extreme side of religious and cultural politics had been so clearly part of our history. Once this was raised naturally things began to make more sense.

This helped to explain from a sociological sense why and how gender, sexuality, and spirituality were marginalised in Mi'kmaw culture. In the Eurocentric colonial gaze, the three dimensions of sex, gender, and spirit are fused into one system of homophobic heteronormative legalism. Thus, the contemporary uptake of Puoinaq is more than simply relevant but is potentially deeply healing.

Much the same dynamic happened in European tribal nations throughout the middle ages as the power of the church grew and imposed violence upon the keepers of medicine, lore, story, and cultural wisdom - women, elders, and gender variant gay and lesbian people whose place in societies around the world tends toward keeping sacred their creative cultural arts. And yet, the historical record shows clearly that gay men were persecuted along with witches, midwives, and anyone suspected of or feared to challenge the dominant male hetero-exclusive exercise of power. My PhD had me examine this history for a full year, leading to the first chapter of the thesis looking at how European cultures treated same-gender love since the medieval era to today.

Therefore, from analysis of western constructs to holding a culturally Indigenous scholarly view, Puoinaq as a word, concept, and cultural repository holds huge potential for exploring the healing of our nation. Ironically and humorously Mi'kmaw people might say 'Puoinaq jij' to catch the irony of 'Little Person of Power,' or 'Person of Little Power' to push the loving joke a bit further. Or likewise to acknowledge youthfulness in these ways. To call oneself a Puoinaq jij is quite appropriate, we are always students and learners on the path.

The word 'Puoinaq' is useful to suggest a wide range of meanings as well as the higher degrees of the Two Spirit phenomenon that embrace spirituality and medicine traditions. These are indeed 'great' because they are of great value to families, tribal groups, and the nation. What is great to the Mi'kmaq is what serves family, tribe, and nation in humility of purpose. You find this paradox of humility in every teaching.

As one Elder said, when the Two Spirit are given a place of honour and respect not only will they serve the nation with great humility, but the nation will also become strong again. Implied here is the relationship of the people to their Medicine Keepers, and to their sense of embodiment and freedom to love one another in relationships of deep abiding respect and honour. Also implied are how the symbolic place of the Puoinaq represents vital knowledge systems, ways of knowing, and practices of culture and learning that are part of nation building. While these ways of knowing were diminished and marginalised during colonisation elders suggest these ways were never lost. These ways are reawakening now. Coming back to the Elder's Circles along with the Sacred Pipes.

We cannot overlook how the notion of Two Spirit emancipation among the Elders also suggests the reality of how these same Elders were subject to the rape and violence of residential schools, and how children today, many of whom are not Indigenous, are taken away in even greater numbers into off-reserve families, many of whom are not Indigenous. Disenfranchisement happens in a number of ways and perhaps Two Spirit people are seen as one of the more vulnerable groups among the people, targeted for generations during this central battle against European invasion and cultural genocide.

Because the colonial-gaze, as monolithic as it was, viewed the Mi'kmaq people as having no religious beliefs and sought to convert us to Christianity, the power dynamics of survival sent cultural teachings underground and abroad. Wise and astute Grand Chief Membertou and 21 members of his family in a sign of good faith became baptised in 1610. Now there are layers of Catholicism in our history overall. St Anne became our patron saint, being a grandmother. Her regard says more about our people than about the Christian tradition that does not tend to elevate Anne to such a degree.

Many today view the choice of Membertou as a benevolent gesture that was never meant to suggest conversion to Christianity per se, but as nurturing collegial political relations with the King of France and his governors. In the context of the day, the French-Mi'kmaq relationship was indeed collegial, as many families intermarried, and the rule of law was in certain ways bilateral for that brief time in history.

If the baptism of the Grand Chief was meant as gesture of good will or more, and whether he understood the implications is highly speculative. Given the complexity of symbolism and the difficulty in translating the meaning of Latin baptismal rites into Mi'kmaq which is a work that has never been completed to date, it is more than likely that Membertou was at a distinct disadvantage.

In the post-colonial sense at least, it is perhaps more important to acknowledge how Christian and Catholic baptism was viewed by the French, and then later subverted to other ends under British colonial rule, and then used by Catholic missionaries and the latter establishment of Catholic churches on all of the reservations across the territory. To a careful look into how contemporary Catholic and Christian relations with the Mi'kmaq are managed. This analysis and critique of colonial Christian-Mi'kmaq relations are quite another story indeed, and a story that dearly needs to be researched and written by future Mi'kmaw scholars.

Not exactly incidentally, some 42 years later my French ancestor Michel Richard arrived in 1652 and began a long line of intermarriage among the Mi'kmaq of the Bear River and Acadian bands of the Mi'kmaq Nation. Our heritage is now 14 generations later and is documented with the Mi'kmaq Resource Centre. In Mi'kmaw symbolism, 7x2 generations is significant, a turning point. In a sense our current generations are pivotal in ways that may not be obvious to many living in our era. Suffice it to say we are like all generations the 7th generation that is spoken of in prophecy and story.

The prophecy suggests that when the medicines come home to the people, a great time of healing and nation building will begin. But here again, the same can be said for every generation and we are all of the 7th generation! However, for me personally this skin-time and the fact of the history has made me stop and consider, what ways can I make a difference in this life? Why am I here? What can I do for my people? Perhaps all youth need to ask these questions. These questions really do open up vision quest and truth be told the important part is not finding your answer. The more important aspect is living your questions.

The ancient practices of Mawio'mi or gathering during the summer abundance at Chapel Island and Merigomish continue from ancient times where the Chiefs of the nation gather to discuss national issues and govern tribal boundaries and sustainability issues for fishing and hunting. Colonisation has changed some things, but not everything.

The Puoinaq have various roles according his/her capacities and skills. For instance, combined with these traditions is L'nui-nsisun - Herbal Medicine of the People, given pride of place among the Medicine Keepers, this is first a practical art for health and wellness.

Secondly for emotional and social wellbeing. Always for spiritual insight. For example, Welin'gwe'l Msiku - Sweet Grass has astringent purification aspects with great ceremonial value, particularly in honour of Ancestors and thanksgiving of gratitude. Also helpful with depression, especially during winter months. Many other herbs hold valuable properties being recorded these days and celebrated more so among the people.

Traditional ways of life were and are governed by practicality and personal skill, strength or ability. What one is drawn to do for the family or group is often encouraged. Better to have a happy camper than someone grumbling and annoying. Things are often taken as the path of least resistance in allowing diversity of behaviours in fun, laughter, and good relations.

Respect is the primary value across every relationship, between people or with animals and nature. While not actually nomadic the Mi'kmaq had distinct tribal territories that were divided by the Chiefs and ratified for the sake of sustainability in fishing and hunting. For instance, my family is said to have gathered on the coast during summers in numbers up to 300 or so people. The abundance and climate allowed for good fish and game, foraging and sustainable practices.

To be nomadic suggests no organisation or territorial values. Imagine 300 people dispersing for the winter months, tracking to their traditional winter grounds only to find another family camped. I'm sure that must have happened now and then. But the results of such mistakes could be catastrophic. To survive the winter with reduced game and fishing in extremely harsh permafrost conditions would place extra burdens on the ecology, likely leading to starvation of members of a family group.

To prevent this eventuality as well as the risk of injury from argument and conflict among people the elected Chiefs and Elders would gather first thing after proper greetings and hold Council for the summer dealing with important business. Whose winter grounds were good this year, who needs a new location, what was the game doing and how were our kin of the Bear Nation or Wolf Nation? The predators and game would be discussed, the issues of the land and regeneration of the bush was considered. Plans were made, and agreements struck on who would go where for the winter months ahead. Hardly nomadic. This was an advanced form of consensus civic organisation and sustainable governance based on a scientific model of human and environmental ecology.

My family for example has connections between the coast of the South Shore and Bay of Fundy of Nova Scotia. Our winter grounds were back near Wildcat reservation, around what is now Queens County. In the 1650s Michel Richard settled his family at Belle Isle near Port Royal. Over time the family embraced Mi'kmaw ways and remained loyal during the worse parts of the Acadian Expulsion.

While much was lost, much remains. Men's roles today might look a bit different but still celebrate similar energies and skills. These traditionally include hunting, making bows, arrows, lances, axes, tools, cradle boards for infants, and stone pipes. Men learn the arts of making shields, spears, fishtraps, canoes, snowshoes, cooking implements, and knives. From today's view, I don't think fixing cars, machinery, computers, carpentry, chopping wood, or driving trucks and snow ploughing are all that different jobs for men. Men today share many roles with women like they always have.

Not always exclusive to gender women's focus includes setting camp, carrying whatever was kept between camps, preparing hides, skinning animals, food preparation, food preservation, weaving baskets, making woven mats, rushes, Birch bark dishes, and containers, making clothing, cording snowshoes, keeping fire, gathering wood, and during harvest and foraging the gathering and preservation of food stuffs.

Women took care of infants and children and all together took responsibilities for raising children as a village among an extended family kinship system. Today women will keep the home going in similar ways. Modern demands on family life hold different but similar challenges. When you consider how robust our Ancestors were to live in Wigwams and cook on the open fire every day, we have much to be thankful for, and much to learn.

One fascinating story that I remember is how a certain woman felt sorry for her partner who she saw had great difficulty going from trap to trap and carrying game back to camp. He had to cross this river to get to the other side of the lake, then back again, meanwhile a trap went off in a distant location. He had to walk far and expend valuable time and energy. This is what people did for generations. She pondered this problem a long time and funny enough she had three dreams, one dream each night, over a period

of time. She dreamed how to make a canoe. Each dream gave her more ideas and clarity. When she woke from the third dream, she knew she had seen how to build this container from Birch bark because in her dream, she had to collect game that was put in the centre of the canoe, easily carried back to shore and brought to camp.

She got her partner to help build the canoe, much to his dismay. The story that goes into great detail in each step of the process, sad we cannot share that here. Then when the canoe was ready, told him what to do.

He gingerly got one foot into the canoe and it rocked side to side. He jumped out in fear! She told him to get back in, that he had to get in this way, and how to sit, and what direction to face. He listened and eventually after much to do, she got in the canoe and paddled him across the edge of the lake first staying close to shore because he was still so fearful.

She knew it would work OK. Her dream told her so, and she knew how to make a very good Birch container for cooking, keeping fresh food, and setting delicate fern greens in a smaller Birch bowl inside a larger pot of water to steam them just right. Her dream was true.

The story continues through their adventures in that first ever canoe, and to the place where she settled many leagues up river to a lake she had never seen before, to the special island where loons raised their young. She decided to rest and to die on that island, which she did, and she was happy. I read a similar story to this in Whitehead (2002) and surprising how the stories overlap in detail. This is often the case with our oral traditional stories. Language is like this, as words have meanings that carry across distance and time. It is a spiritual gift, language.

Two Spirit realities arise from the mists of time through this same spiritual ecology of story and language, this culture of language. This is family life. Today's world might challenge this central value, but the Two Spirit role upholds this value in service to the family. This is our primary role and purpose. This is the underlying meaning of the language and spirituality of our Two Spirit cultural ways.

The words below or phrases were collected over a 10-year period. Many do not use the Francis Smith orthography. They appear as they were given, and this seems more respectful at this time. Also, I am not qualified to change them into a certain orthography.

As language is personal and meaningful, and as a Mi'kmaw Two Spirit doing my best with the little resources available, please accept this sharing of language with my respect and deeper humility.

We leave the tasks of linguistic organisation and sorting 'right from wrong' forms to the young ones who are interested in that sort of thing. John Sylliboy (2017) does the nation a great service in his thesis that honours traditional Mi'kmaw ways and arising from his first language speaker's knowledge. His work is instructive and inspiring. We have the pleasure of reading his thesis as we finish this book, and while he expresses things in a different manner the underlying treatment of language and culture appear fairly similar and parallel. This gives me a sense of humility and respect for the robust nature of Mi'kmaw languages, cultures, and spiritualities that can bridge the distances between first language speakers and those of us who grew up off reservation and without this wealth of language. It is extremely telling what the author says about the emergent nature of knowledge. 'Conceptualizing two-spirit within Mi'kmaw language and storytelling to understand it within a cultural worldview, is part of the transformation within the flux, a source of developing new knowledge as part of a cultural continuity (2017, p. 84).

Beginning the path many years ago not knowing one word that referred to Two Spirit, the most immediate impression is wow. Incredible. And here is a book to reflect our identity and build strong families... This is so amazing.

The following word list is fairly broad, and this is intentional, in the sense that Mi'kmaq is a contextual verb-based and fluid language that relies on an extremely rich wholistic, cognitive, ontopoetic, and open-hearted consciousness. This list is hardly definitive and is itself an expression of continual reflection and learning. Sitting with one word can last many years, even decades. New associations and meanings, the addition of prefixes or suffixes can blow apart limited perspectives and open up whole new vistas.

This reminds me of sitting with a Mi'kmaw man at Eskasoni who shared with me how one of my given names in language, Paq'tism, is reflecting the actual sound of a wolf tearing into the flesh of an animal. His description and how he said the word shocked and excited me, giving me a whole new This reminds me of sitting with a Mi'kmaw man at Eskasoni who shared with me how one of my given names in language, Paq'tism, is reflecting the actual sound of a wolf tearing into the flesh of an animal. His description and how he said the word shocked and excited me, giving me a whole new

In English this quality is called onomatopoetic, i.e. 'the imitation of sound.' But fascinating to realise that the word's actual roots come from Greek where it means 'making or creating names.'

The cultural role of Shieldwolf and from 'Randolph' in its ancient Indigenous Teutonic linkages suggests the wolf who serves the Alpha by scouting ahead and returning to the pack, letting them know when safety or danger lies ahead. In Mi'kmaq the Paq'tism has an Alpha quality but can be associated with other roles and is a word for wolf generally. The scout in Mi'kmaq are navigators across land, sea, and by mapping the stars. Orienteering is a key survival skill that all Mi'kmaq once learned. The scouts sought good hunting grounds, looked for dangers, read the signs of animal migration, and sensed the seasonal changes leading to change of camp. Like John Sylliboy (2017) suggests of his role as an educator, we have also taken these roles of seeking far and wide for wisdom as a healer, counsellor, and therapist drawing potentials for change among those we work with and for our people.

In Mi'kmaq we see and feel intuitively an incredibly creative emergence of meaning, sound and story; imagery and imagination; moving pictures and narrative developments; twists and turns and deep ecological associations that ebb and flow like the Fundy tides. It is important to realise that these insights come from a non-first-language speaker, as we feel that if we can grasp these layers of complexity and can respect deeply the Mi'kmaw worldview simply from the rare fragments we are given, then surely anyone can learn and be enriched. Mi'kmaw language has a vital part to play in knowledge generation in Canada and around the world. Mi'kmaw language has a cross-cultural and global significance that in fact contributes to many emerging fields of science and practice let alone having a key role to play in the present global need for robust linguistic and scientific frameworks that can ensure ecological sustainability and environmental regeneration.

Regarding sources for words began during the early 1990s. In a sense, my life long scouting for reconnection as a displaced Mi'kmaw person led to collecting language fragments over many years. The first that I remember finding was a word that was described as 'he chases men.' I cannot say how that one word opened up validation and relief in heart and mind. As simple and strange, and funny as it sounds this is true. My hope is that this word list will help Mi'kmaw youth in future and will inspire more study and learning to build our families and inner resilience. Sources for most of these words are lost to time as they were often written on scraps of paper and transferred into files over a twenty-eight-year period. Many were found online, others were given in discussion with friends and family, others gleaned from media and then social media when that emerged

Many people appear to be searching for one word to say, 'Two Spirit' in the Mi'kmaq language. They hope to find something that proves the existence of a tradition from the past. We used to seek this, but over the years we have come to appreciate a cultural perspective. This point of view feels family and community contexts and a sense of timelessness that exists in the now with our Ancestors. Language may come to express Two Spirit more directly over time, and as we begin to heal from colonialism and move on into our own ways, but this is a journey perhaps even a bit of a vision quest for our generations living now. As such, the following word list provides context not specifics per se. Broad contours rather than detailed images. Whether we like this or not, it appears that the Elder's Sacred Council is still in discussion over these matters.

As stated throughout this chapter, this list is not exhaustive nor definitive. This is a work in progress that we hope will be further developed in future by others interested in linguistic studies. We have inserted a star (*) to indicate words more directly associated with observed usage for LGBTIQ2S+ meanings. Again, we note that observations of more direct word usage reinforce the acknowledgement of a non-gendered and non-sexualised cosmology within traditional culture among the Mi'kmaq people.