Going deeper into understanding this territory
Because I lead a lot meetings, I often get asked to do territorial acknowledgements before the work begins. And because I’ve been a supporter of Squamish language education and fluency through the Sníchim Foundation I’ve been trying to learn how to do that in the Squamish language. The text above is a very basic acknowledgement of territory, that was shared with me by Khelsílem a while ago and I’ve been using it for gatherings held here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island)*
* my current blog fonts settings can’t cope with some of the characters in Squamish orthography. I recognize that’s a problem. Any suggestions for addressing that are welcome!
I have long ago made sure I had a set of characters on my regular keyboard that i can use to create a set of sound bites that spoken together by me, are as close to the correct way of saying the words as I can get….The phrase used by you is very long….I mostly try to find a way to pronounce the proper names as close as I can get…my oldest one is Sencoten…and in IPA it looks nothing like that…but pronounced as I laid it out back in 2006 when I started working for that group : SEN -CHAW-Then…..It lets me SOUND closer to the proper word…and I use other keyboard symbols for the glottal stops etc Its only useful for ME but it does ensure that when I am speaking to people I at least get their proper names as close as I can get…
I get that. And for languages I’m less familiar with I’ll use my own private alphabet to make sure I get the pronunciation right.
I can pronounce the Squamish alphabet pretty well and I have the Squamish keyboard installed on my phone and computers. My WordPress typefaces can’t handle the characters though hence why the acknowledgement is an image file rather than text missing the diacritics.