Kanatawakhon, a Kanienkéha teacher who helped revive the language, dies at 70

In June 1963, a Japanese song called Sukiyaki hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in the United States.

Kanatawakhon (David) Maracle was a young man when he heard it on the radio and thought "if they can do that in Japanese why not Kanien'kéha," recalled his brother Curtis Maracle. 

While he didn't write any songs in Kanienkéha (the Mohawk language) before he died last month, Kanatawakhon envisaged a new way to teach his language called the root word method and his legacy is heard through modern-day Kanienkéha speakers across Haudenosaunee territories in North America.

Kanatawakhon translates to "He shakes the town" in Kanien'kéha. 

In the '50s and '60s, there were still first language speakers in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, the community where Kanatawakhon was born about 170 kilometres east of Toronto — but they were dwindling. 

In his early teens he started visiting first language speakers in his community and writing words down phonetically from their conversations so he could remember them later, said his brother Curtis.

He felt compelled to learn the language, because it wasn't being taught by parents who were students of residential and day schools, which discouraged Indigenous languages in favour of English and French.

Kanien'kéha is still critically endangered today.

Kanien'kéha is a polysynthetic language — words consist of many morphemes, or word parts, and can function as standalone sentences. It is a verb-based language unlike English which relies heavily on nouns. 

Kà:sere, for example, is the Kanien'kéha word for car. Prefixes and suffixes can be added to the word to indicate ownership, descriptions of the car and the verb tense. For example, yakoserehtsherí:yo means "she has a good car." 

In the '70s, Kanatawakhon studied all the Kanien'kéha texts he could, to source as many morphemes as he could find, to verify rules and patterns to determine how it all fit together. 

Tehota'kerá:ton Green, a Kanien'kéha linguist from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory said Kanatawakhon called these "always rules, with exceptions."

Green said he did this to learn the language more efficiently so that he could teach it to others.

Kanatawakhon wrote his dictionaries on sheets colour-coded so the parts of speech could be differentiated.