Tag Archives: scripture

Final volume of the Naskapi 3-year Lectionary published

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Advent 2012 begins “Year-C” of the Revised Common Lectionary, the collection of Sunday Bible readings that are used in the Naskapi church. You may remember that the “Year-A” book came out almost two years ago now (the blue book) and the church has been using the “Year-B” book (the red book) for the past fifty-one weeks. Over the past several months we have reviewed and revised the remaining Old Testament verses that are contained in the “Year-C” book, and we have just printed sixty copies for distribution. On November 23 another prayer was answered: All the boxes of Year-C books arrived in Kawawachikamach in time for the first Sunday of Advent, which is December 2 this year!

Each Sunday morning, a selection from the Old Testament is read (generally somewhere between 8 and 30 verses), followed by a Psalm; then the New Testament readings: a selection from the Epistles and a passage from the Gospels. The three-year lectionary cycle is used by many denominations of the church, in which Scripture readings are arranged according to a schedule that follows the calendar of the year. This practice of assigning particular readings to each Sunday and Holy day has continued through the history of the Christian church. During the course of three years, more than seven thousand verses are read aloud to the congregation, a total that represents almost one-quarter of the Bible.

Like the other volumes of the lectionary, these books are being published and distributed by the Naskapi Development Corporation. People can drop by the office in Kawawachikamach anytime to purchase their own copy for just $10. The books are printed in diglot; that is, with the Naskapi text along side the English on each page. Readers simply look up the current Sunday in the index and turn to the appropriate page.

Anyone outside of Kawawachikamach can order this book (and many other fine Naskapi books) from the Naskapi Resources page of the Lulu website, at this address: www.lulu.com/spotlight/naskapi. The Year C volume is a perfect companion to Year A and Year B.

Even though the Year C volume completes the series, the Naskapi Development Corporation translation and language services department continues to actively review and revise these readings each week as they are read at church, and plans to publish updated versions during the coming three-year cycle. The latest volume would make a perfect Christmas gift for any of your Naskapi family or friends.

There are several more Naskapi publication projects nearing completion in the coming months. We are currently working on the final check of a proof of the entire book of Genesis in Naskapi that should be completed in the coming weeks Lord willing, followed by the 2013 Naskapi Scripture calendar, a new Naskapi children’s book, the first book of Naskapi legends featuring Kuîhkwâhchâw (Wolverine), and the final book in the Walking With Jesus series of Bible stories on the life of Christ.

We want to thank you for your interest and support for all of these Naskapi language projects.

Serving with you, Bill and Norma Jean

 

Naskapi 2012 Scripture Calendar

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As in previous years, we have prepared a Naskapi language Scripture calendar for distribution at Kawawachikamach, in partnership with the Naskapi Development Corporation. The pictures this year feature archive photographs of “Naskapi Places”.

If you have followed our translation work with the Naskapi over the years, you may have learned that the Naskapi people did not always live here near Schefferville, Quebec–the ancestors of the current Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach were nomadic caribou hunters who traveled over vast tracts of the interior of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula. Since their first contact with Europeans in the 1830s, the records of their travels became linked to the establishment of Hudson’s Bay posts in their territory.

The earliest photograph (for January) is of a Naskapi encampment near Fort Chimo in 1884, attributed to Lucien Turner, who wrote one of the earliest descriptions of Naskapi ancestors for the Smithsonian Institution (Turner, Lucien. 1894. “Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory”. in: Eleventh Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1889-1890. Washington, Government Printing Office.)

Each month of the calendar provides a chronological account in photographs of the various locations where the Naskapi were settled from 1884 to the present-day. Accompanying each picture, there is a scripture passage selected for the month, in the Naskapi language and in English.

Further, each month is presented in the Naskapi language, with Naskapi days of the week, and an indication of special days and the seasons of the church calendar that correspond to the Sunday Lectionary (see the posts here and here for more about the Lectionary).

The calendar also has a few bonus pages this year that contain a brief history of the Naskapi people’s migrations from the mid 1800s to the present.

This year, as in previous years, a beautiful printed version of the Naskapi calendar is available along with other Naskapi language materials from Lulu.com for just $8.

We are also running off locally-printed versions of the calendar (on the photocopier) on request distributed from the NDC office in Kawawachikamach. Local residents can purchase a copy at the office for $5.

 

Northern Translation Brief 26Sep2011

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Our Dear Partners,
We would like to thank you for your prayers for us as we traveled to the Mushuau Innu community of Natuashish on the Labrador coast. We are very happy to report a good trip, a warm welcome, and many good and positive contacts with regard to helping the Mushuau Innu language community to take some steps towards building capacity to start a local translation project into their dialect. The Naskapi Mother-Tongue Translators who work with us at Kawawachikamach, Phil, Silas and George, were very encouraging to their Mushuau Innu speaking counterparts at Natuashish. Indeed, speakers from the two communities, Naskapi and Mushuau Innu, have very little difficulty in understanding each other’s speech.

Naskapi MTTs and the Mushuau Innu chief and deputy

We met with the Mushuau Innu leadership at their council office, including the chief, Simeon Tshakapesh, and the councillor in charge of education, Simon Pokue. We also spent time at the Natuashish school, and made some important contacts there for Innu language literacy and helping to establish consistency in spelling.

We discussed the possibility of Bible translation work with Sister Sheila, who serves the parish church at Natuashish, and also with Cajetan Rich, who serves in the church as one of the Innu language lay-readers. Cajetan helped us with a draft publication of a church book, providing us with recommended spelling changes and revisions.

We are grateful for hospitality and assistance from workers with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland and Labrador, who serve the community by hosting a Sunday School and the school breakfast program. We were provided with an excellent opportunity to meet with the Hon. Peter Penashue, the first Innu Member of Parliament, who was visiting in the community at the time.

Meeting with Hon. Peter Penashue MP

Finally, representatives from the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) were in Natuashish meeting with local leadership, and they took the time to also meet with us to learn about how language-based development work has benefited the Naskapi community, and how it could also be applied in the Natuashish community.

To top it all off, back at Kawawa three days after getting back ourselves, we were unexpectedly visited by an entourage from the Natuashish community: The Mushuau Innu band council chartered two aircraft and flew direct from Natuashish to Schefferville with 28 visitors, including their chief and deputy, some elders and youth, and various other leaders in their community. They toured the Naskapi community, got re-acquainted with relatives, and met with the Naskapi translation department where we work on Bible translation. They were very interested in learning from the Naskapi team how they might establish a similar initiative in their own community.

Monique Rich and Norma Jean

Now that we are back here in Kawawa working on Naskapi Old Testament and literacy, and the Mushuau Innu have gone home to Natuashish, we are looking forward to seeing what God is going to do in both communities.

Thank you for continuing to pray for both of these communities, their response–and ours.

Serving with you, Bill and Norma Jean

Northern Translation Brief 06Sep2011

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Our Dear partners,

We are preparing for our second trip to the Mushuau Innu community of Natuashish on the Labrador coast. As most of you remember, this community is closely related to the Naskapi in the interior; in fact their recent ancestors were the nomadic caribou-hunting families of the barren grounds of what is now Quebec and Labrador. Some of these families centered their trading around Kuujjuaq (Fort Chimo) near Ungava Bay and the rest were settled around Utshimassits (Davis Inlet) on the Labrador coast, since the early 1900s.

The Fort Chimo group moved to the Schefferville region in 1956, and they are now the Naskapi of Kawawachikamach.

The Davis Inlet group relocated to Natuashish, a new community built on the mainland in 2002.

The Mushuau Innu community is well known in Canada because of widely publicized social problems:

<Natuashish on CBC>

Because of their shared history, the Naskapi language spoken where we work in Kawawachikamach is very close to the speech variety spoken in Natuashish. But there are significant differences that developed over the past 100 years due to contact with outsiders:

  • The Naskapi live in Quebec, the Mushuau Innu live in Labrador
  • The Naskapi live inland, the Mushuau Innu live on the coast
  • The Naskapi write in Canadian Syllabics, the Mushuau Innu write in a Roman orthography
  • The Naskapi are Anglicans, the Mushuau Innu are Catholics
  • The Naskapi are in the Quebec school system, the Mushuau Innu are in the Newfoundland school system

In the spring of 2008 we tried to take a trip to Natuashish, but we were hindered by foggy weather on the coast.

Bill and two other Naskapi colleagues made it there in April of 2010 for a four-day visit.

Bill and Norma Jean will be leaving Friday, 9 September with his co-worker (and former Naskapi chief) Phil Einish, and mother tongue translators Silas Nabinicaboo and George Guanish.

For an interactive Google Map (zoom in and see the Natuashish village) try this link:

<Kawawa to Natuashish>

On Friday we are scheduled to fly south to Wabush, in western Labrador, and then east to Goose Bay in central Labrador. Sunday, 11 Sept we are scheduled to fly north to Natuashish on the coast, spending five days there before returning back the way we came starting Friday, 16 Sept.

The goals of this trip include presenting the possibilities of a community-based language development project that would include scripture translation into the Mushuau Innu language for Natuashish.

Thanks for your prayers for good contacts, travels, and outcomes.

Pray for us: “that our love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that we would be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God.” Phil. 1:9
(The apostle Paul expresses it better that I can.)

Serving with you, Bill and Norma Jean

Summer Translation Brief

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Our dear Partners,

Greetings from the University of North Dakota where we have been living and working for nine weeks this summer. Bill is enrolled in an MA program in linguistics at the graduate school here, and Norma Jean is serving as the program’s Director of Childcare. Jaiden is still with us and keeping us on our toes as we serve him and his family as his Foster Parents.

By mid-August, we will be on our way back to the Naskapi community in Northern Quebec where we continue to serve their translation and language project.

Some important milestones for our family this summer: We gained a son-in-law at the beautiful wedding of our daughter Elizabeth to Eric Stevenson on July 16 at our home church in Connecticut. It was a wonderful, happy day and God has answered so many of our prayers.

Eric and Elizabeth will make our house in Preston their new home as they begin their lives together.

Bill has made good progress on his Master’s degree in linguistics–Lord willing, two more summers of university work should allow him to complete the program. Meanwhile, the rest of the year we will continue to work on the Naskapi and other related language projects.

This summer Nick also completed his State GED, earning his diploma. We are grateful to all our friends who supported him as he reached this goal. We are proud of him and eager to see how God will continue to lead him in his life.

Finally, in the past few months we have completed some important publication goals for the Naskapi project: The first edition of the Naskapi Lectionary Readings (Year A) which contain a considerable portion of Old Testament Lessons in Naskapi, was published in time to be used in the Naskapi Church at Easter. Also, Norma Jean and Elizabeth collaborated on another Naskapi literacy book “Little Lost Caribou”, which was published simultaneously in Naskapi and in English by Eric and Elizabeth under “Pocket Vinyl Productions”.

In spite of the busy summer, it has been a joy see all our children and our grandchildren again. Ben and Tamika are still in Baltimore with their children Nya and Arion, and Nick is staying in Preston with Eric and Elizabeth.

Serving with you, Bill and Norma Jean

Northern Translation Brief 20May2010

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Our Dear Partners,

Here are a couple matters for prayer as you think about us. First, just about a week ago Quebec social services placed a small Naskapi boy named Jaiden in our care. Jaiden is three-years-old, sweet, cute and happy; and we have been friends with his grandparents and his mom ever since we first came to Kawawa. At the grandfather’s request we welcomed him into our family because of a crisis in his own family. We speak mainly Naskapi with him, so it is good practice (and at times stretching!) If it becomes necessary, we are prepared to bring him with us to SIL school at the University of North Dakota this summer, but the details are in God’s hands.

Next, regarding SIL school, I (Bill) must leave Schefferville by this Friday’s train in order to travel cross-country and arrive there in time to begin my Masters’ program there. I will be driving alone, and must arrive by Thursday May 27. Any prayers for a safe and on-time trip are appreciated! Norma Jean stays on in Schefferville (with Jaiden) until school is out on June 23, and then flies out to Grand Forks ND to meet me on June 23 and 24. At the SIL school, after she arrives, Norma Jean will be on full-time volunteer staff serving as the childcare coordinator there for the children of other SIL students. Browse an interactive Google Maps version of this map here.

Norma Jean will continue to get mail at home in Schefferville until June 22, and our mailing address through the summer (until the first week of August) will be:

Bill & Norma Jean Jancewicz
c/o SIL-UND
2901 University Avenue Stop 8217
University of North Dakota
Grand Forks ND 58202, USA

After summer classes we will return to Schefferville via Baltimore (a visit with Ben & Tamika and our grandchildren) and Connecticut (a visit with Nick and Bill’s mom).

Also, keep praying for the translation team staying behind in Schefferville, especially Tshiueten and Silas, and they continue work on bringing the Good Book to the Naskapi in their own language.

Serving with you, Bill and Norma Jean

Northern Translation Brief 08 April 2010

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Our Dear Partners,

Thank you for praying for Bill’s trip to the Mushuau Innu community of Natuashish last week. He went with two Naskapi co-workers and they all returned on Friday, April 2.

The remote communities of Kawawachikamach and Natuashish are the two communities where most of the nomadic caribou-hunting groups from the northern half of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula were settled. Their languages and culture are still very similar. But they have been separated from each other now for about 100 years.

So one of the purposes of this trip was to determine whether materials produced for Naskapi could be used for the Mushuau Innu. Since there is a degree of mutual intelligibility, we had hope that this would be the case.

The data we collected, however, leads us to a different conclusion. The Mushuau Innu may be able to decipher some of the Naskapi translation, but that is a long ways from being able to use it. There are differences in not only the sound system of the languages (that being the first thing one notices) but also differences in the grammatical structure as well as a different inventory of lexical items (sometimes, they use different words altogether). So our Naskapi work will at best be of indirect help to them.

On the other hand, many Mushuau Innu individuals expressed a strong desire to have a language project started in their community, and several of them indicated that they would like to be involved. They said that they would like to have a Bible translation project started in their own dialect, so that they would not have to “decipher” (translate from) the existing Bible translations in related dialects.

The Naskapi team then offered to help the Mushuau Innu to form the partnerships that can help them to get started with a translation project in their own language. We can help them find the training and assistance they will need to carry this out. Their local government, their church, and their school leadership all expressed their support for their own translation project.

Now, Bill has to prepare a report for the survey trip for several audiences: The Mushuau Innu community and the Naskapi community would like to use this trip as a catalyst for more cultural exchanges. Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International, along with other potential stakeholders, need to have the linguistic survey data that Bill collected analyzed in order to better assess the specific ways that the two dialects differ. And the groundwork needs to be laid for the Mushuau Innu team to begin on their own translation project.

During interviews with Mushuau Innu speakers, discussing the possibility of a translation project in their own language, they said:

“Our dialect is different; why should we have to learn a different language in order to read it?” –Innu teacher at the school

“We would like to be allowed to use Mushuau Innu spelling to write our language.” –Innu office worker

“A Mushuau Innu translation of the Bible is long overdue.” –clergyman ministering to the Innu for the past 30 years

“Forming a committee to work on a Mushuau Innu translation is something that is needed,” and “What do we have to do to get started?” –former chief of the Natuashish community

“I don’t want my children to be speaking only English in the future.” –former band manager

“We would be happy to have help (from Wycliffe) to start our own Bible translation project.” –Mushuau Innu church lay reader

Thank you again for your prayers for this trip.

Keep on praying for Bill as he spends the next few weeks writing the reports, for the vision for a Bible translation of their own to grow in the Mushuau Innu community, for the Naskapi to know what they can do to help them get started, and for God’s continued work among these people in the north.

Blessings, Bill and Norma Jean

Naskapi Scripture Calendar 2010

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This year’s Scripture Calendar is in print! The pictures this year feature photographs of Naskapi traditional craftmanship, and were originally published in:

Sarrazin, Johan. 1977. Naskapi 77 : une exposition des arts traditionnels des Naskapis / Naskapi 77 : an exhibition of traditional crafts of the Naskapi. Montréal.

Photo archives were digitally processed by Zerflin.com

for the Naskapi Development Corp.

Complete photo archive availablehere

Anyone can order their own copy online from Lulu.com

The Scripture selections this year are in Naskapi and English, and are taken from the Lectionary readings for Sundays in the church calendar.

Other Naskapi language resources are available here:Naskapi Storefront at Lulu

Thanks for visiting!