The Beginning of Print Culture in Athabasca Country: A Facsimile Edition & Translation of a Prayer Book in Cree Syllabics by Father Émile Grouard, O.M.I. Prepared and Printed at Lac La Biche in 1883 (review)

This book is a unique contribution to sociocultural history and to Aboriginal language studies. It introduces the reader to a forgotten document and calls attention to an often neglected dimension of early missionary work—its attention to language. The original text brings to light the process of recontextualizing Christianity through the complex translation of beliefs into indigenous languages and its reflective dimension. It is relevant to note that the original text was prepared and printed in the Oblate Mission, Notre Dame des Victoires in Lac La Biche (a community with Cree, Métis, Saulteaux, and Montagnais residents), in Athabasca Country with a Paris-made press by Father Émile Grouard, M.O. (1840–1931).Thus, the book also opens a window to the dissemination of print culture in western Canada, as the authors have written in the preface, and to the exploration of “the fusions of Cree, French, and Latin linguistic patterns” (p. x).

The foreword, written by Arok Wolvengrey of the First Nations University of Canada, provides the most appropriate comments situating the work in the contemporary context and calling attention to the difficult tasks of the authors/translators, given the temporal distance from Grouard’s work and even possible misunderstandings on his part. In the preface the translators make clear that the transcription and transliteration, as well as the English translation of the phonemic system of the sound and word patterns of Cree Syllabics (geometric characters representing syllables), represented a challenge. Given the changes of meaning, the representation of Cree sounds, and the differences in sentence patterns between the time of the original publication to today, the authors/translators have included both a direct transcription of Grouard’s Syllabics in Roman font and a transliteration of Cree in italics, according to current linguistic practice.

The introduction brings to the forefront the missionary work of Grouard. Before Grouard traveled to Lac La Biche, he spent thirteen years in the Northwest, became conversant with Aboriginal languages, and learned printing and painting during two years spent in France to recover his health. In September 1876 Grouard went to the Notre Dame des Victoires Mission at Lac La Biche, a place where the aims of the Oblates and those of the Hudson Bay Company often intersected. It is important that the authors also examine the work of the Grey Nuns, their gendered position in the mission, and their spiritual notion of sacrifice that needs to be understood even as their work now can be construed as oppressive of the Aboriginal peoples. Grouard and other early missionaries were open to the mediation of culture and language in the process of Christianization, contrary to the assimilationist patterns of the residential schools later in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. The point is not to argue about the desirability or not of conversion that happened at the intersection of the colonization process, but to underscore the approach at a time of ultramontane missionary zeal.

The afterword, rightly titled “Language and Devotion: A Missionary Use of Cree Syllabics,” is a major contribution to cultural and linguistic history. The authors, having positioned themselves at the interface of oral culture and textual representation, engage in a cultural linguistic analysis of the challenges they encountered in the process of transcription, transliteration, and translation. This book represents a major milestone in Aboriginal studies.