Talk:Innu

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Untitled[edit]

Someone wrote: "As a consequence of this they are not registered under the Indian Act and the government does not afford them the same protection, tax-breaks and benefits as other First Nations."

But the Innu of Quebec are registered under the Indian Act. I do not know if it is also the case in Labrador, but since the sentence is false in this actual way, I removed it.

This article is full of errors. The Naskapi are a completely different people, related to the Davis Inlet people, and do not mind being called "Naskapi", which is actually a native word meaning "the people beyond the horizon". The Naskapi have a second languages of English, first coming into contact with English-speaking fur traders on the Northern shores of Quebec. ~Benjamin Jancewicz

The Naskapi are definitely not a completely different people. The main differences that are used to account for labelling them a different people are a result of colonization. Besides that they basically have the same culture, speak a dialect of the same language, and are genetically related to the rest of the Innu, Iynu (East Cree). In fact, the way the reservations were set up separated peoples of the same family into what is now different nations as recognized by Indian Affairs. If we quit using all these exonyms such as Cree, Naskapi, and Montagnais we could get a clearer picture of the issues. They are all the same people who identify themselves using the same modern dialectical version of the proto-Algonquian word Iliniw. So one dialect pronounces or writes it Innu, another Ilnu, another Iyyu, another Iynu... these are all the same people. Even their myths are the same, pointing to a common world view. There is no basis besides the decision by the Indian Affairs to separate these peoples that could support the claim that they are different peoples. Claims concerning the fact that Innu people and "Naskapi" people considered themselves different all stem from the higher status that Innu people held within the whole nation because of their earlier contact with white traders. There is a book written about this....shouldnt be hard to find since there arent that many books written about Innu people! hahaha. Either way, as an Iynu person myself I find it preposterous when people claim that Naskapis, Montagnais, and East Cree people are different. When one speaks to the elder monolingual speakers they clearly have no idea that people are dividing what they always saw as identical. A person from Waswanipi will confortably call people from Mashteuiatsh Piekwâkamîu-Iynu...no distinction in terms of nationality is made! However, this same person will clearly make a distinction when he talks about an Anishinabe person! These are not called Iynu in any of the dialects. -Kevin Brousseau


The original article was based on the Survival International study of 1999 on the two Innu communities of Labrador, including Davis Inlet. In footnote 4 of the study, the authors proclaim "Although our fieldwork was carried out in two Innu communities in Labrador, most of our findings apply equally to the Innu currently settled in Quebec." Totally false, although high suicide rates are found in all isolated communities in Canada. - Joseph B.

Contributors Need more contributors!

There is a lot more to add to this. There is a lot of information on the CBC website and elsewhere. Someone has to skewer as much info as possible and post it here. --J (talk) 01:13, 27 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Iynu, Innu, Ilnu, and Iyyu[edit]

I don't know why Iynu redirects to Innu. It should be clarified that Innu is used in two sense, to represent the political union of Ilnu (speakers of Western Montagnais) and Innu (Eastern Montagnais) people. Iynu only refers to speakers of Southern East Cree and Iyyu refers to speakers of Northern East Cree and western Naskapi. The later term is often used (mispelled eeyou) as a cover term for the union between northern and southern east cree speakers. Each of these four terms should have specific pages that describe the dialects as well as the present political pages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.82.192.193 (talk) 19:44, 6 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]


It is so very hard for myself to read this and not vomit due to the sick to my stomach feeling I get. This is so very incorrect and shows just how unjustly Canada has treated all of these Innu people. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.163.228.182 (talk) 19:47, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The overall treatment of of Canada's Native population should be represented within each article. If this article doesn't reflect that then fix it using proper sourcing. Of course your vomiting remark is a little hard to believe when it turns out that you think the Innu and Inuit are related. They are different and it's just one of those things that the names are similar and come from the same root. Enter CambridgeBayWeather, waits for audience applause, not a sausage 20:17, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think you'll find too many people contributing here who would disagree that Canada's treatment of aboriginal people has been absolutely shameful, on the whole — but Wikipedia isn't here to be a debating forum or a soapbox. Bearcat (talk) 20:50, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What do Maskuanu and Mushuanu mean?[edit]

What do Mushuanu and Maskuanu mean?

My name is Mushorn but I translate it as Marsh Corner so I find this to be very interesting... Is this similar to Muskeg - "Marsh Cake"? email me at jmushorn@yahoo.com24.25.237.226 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:00, 16 October 2011 (UTC).[reply]

Diet[edit]

The Passenger Pigeon is mentioned as a food source. I wonder if they ate Eskimo Curlew, as well. Before they were slaughtered to extinction, Eskimo Curlews migrated south down the eastern coast of North America. Aliotra (talk) 02:40, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Innu and Inuit[edit]

I have tagged the following – unsourced – statement as dubious:

Although their languages vary in origin, the word derives from the same root, meaning "people".

While de:Innu indicates (however, again without a source) that the name indeed means "people", and inuit means the same, the implication that the root is identical is dubious: the resemblance could well be fortuitous. What makes me doubt the connection is the fact that, as is well known, inuit is simply the plural of inuk "person" in Inuit, which derives from the (reconstructed) ancestral word *iŋuɣ in the Eskimo parent language (Proto-Eskimo, which was apparently spoken in Alaska ca. 1000 AD; see the table at Eskimo–Aleut languages).

As for Innu, the relevant articles indicate that this has a variant form ilnu or ilniw, which seems to be the older form of this word. The cognate form in the Naskapi language is iiyuu or iyiyiw if I understand correctly. This article itself mentions the East Cree variants (northern/coastal) īyiyū and (southern/inland) īnū. While it is not clear to me what the oldest reconstructible form of this word is, the resemblance is far less obvious, taking these cognate forms in account, and most importantly, the word is old in both language families (though it is not clear to me how old exactly the Algonquian word is within Algonquian), which rules out a common origin, even in the form of a loanword borrowed from Algonquian into Inuit, or from Inuit into Algonquian (if the word is reconstructible to Proto-Algonquian, the possibility of a borrowing into Algonquian can be ruled out as completely as the other direction). Eskimo(–Aleut) and Algonquian are two separate language families which have never been spoken close to each other in the more distant but recoverable past: Proto-Eskimo in Alaska – or around the Bering Sea in any case – by ca. 1000 AD, and Proto-Algonquian somewhere along the USA–Canada border by about 500 or 1000 BC, so there is no likelihood of prehistoric contact, either.

What we have here is, by all appearances, no more than a remarkable coincidence: that two ethnic groups who both called themselves something like inu(Vt) (inuit vs. innuat), simply meaning "people" (an unremarkable self-designation), with a similar plural suffix, ended up encountering each other in Eastern Canada in the early 2nd millennium AD after long migrations from more western ancestral locations, but lacking any recoverable deep relations. What we have here is, then, unless I have missed something crucial in this argument, a sound-alike, a tempting but false cognate. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:16, 24 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note that this website also states: Though the Innu and Inuit are neighbors, the similarity between their names is coincidental--their languages are not at all related and have no more in common with each other than with English. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:52, 24 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Innu/ilnu is indeed the word for "human", and as far as I can tell you're right that it goes back to Proto-Algonquian (the source would be *erenyiwa, "man") (though unfortunately the Handbook of North American Indians, in its synonymy for "Montagnais-Naskapi", p. 186 of vol. 6, doesn't explicitly state this, and I don't know the correspondences involved to be sure if the match is actually good). It's probably cognate with similar words in other Cree varieties (iyiniw, iriniw, etc.). Either way, if the original claim was unsourced, and there's good reason not to trust it, there's no reason it should be in the article. So I agree with you --Miskwito (talk) 18:04, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much! Do you think native-languages.org is a reliable enough source to cite for an explicit denial of any connection between the two ethnonyms? I'm sure non-specialised readers, who will likely wonder about this, or may even confuse Innu(at) and Inuit (Roger Ebert certainly did seem slightly confused in this review, calling Innuat an "Eskimo word" and failing to realise that the Innuat are not a purely mythological but a real and even still existing group of people), would appreciate a clear statement. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:48, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]


THE FLAG!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.164.242.71 (talk) 03:33, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Innu Nation flag is upside down in this article as well as various other websites that use the same image of the flag. The snowshoe and antlers should be right-side-up! I am not sure how to fix this!

Neither snowshoes nor removed antlers have any particular natural orientation. If you can find a reliable reference clearly showing the correct orientation of the flag, post it here and I (or someone else) will fix it. Please end your Talk page entries with four tildes (~~~~). David Spector (talk) 20:45, 9 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. Armbrust The Homunculus 11:10, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Innu people → Innu – target is redirect to this title. Redirect created by undiscussed move to the current title by Kwami on Feb 1 2011, citing "vs lang. per naming conv." re WP:NCL even though this is not a language article. That guideline is in error in being in violation of various other major guidelines and principles including precision and conciseness, and Wikipedia:Article titles#Use commonly recognizable names and the guideline Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ethnicities and tribes). Quoting another supporter of such reversions to the original long-standing "standalone" title seen on many other such RMs, "There is no need to redo any guideline as it already supports the un-disabiguated title.", in reference to demands that a guideline discussion is needed (certainly one is required to fix NCL so that it conforms to what other guidelines mandate, however).
As a demonstration of how commonly "Innu" is used by itself, view stats show that there were 1,395 wiki-searches for "Innu" in March 2014 vs 2,957 hits on "Innu people", 1,395 of which would have been hits resulting from being redirected from "Innu", most of the rest resulting from hidden pipes to the people title from "Montagnais", "Innu" etc in the "what links here" articles. I could run a google search for this but I don't think it's necessary, given the guidelines mandating removing the "people" disambiguation and as per ordinary modern usage and, very likely, including academic citations as well. Skookum1 (talk) 05:43, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Light Support The only real competing article is Innu language and it receives approximately a quarter the hits of the article about the people.[1] Innu music and Innu (album) receive even fewer hits.--Labattblueboy (talk) 17:49, 6 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. In cases where the requested move simply eliminates the word "people", and the destination title is already a simple redirect to the current title, it is clear that guidelines favoring both precision and conciseness support the move. Xoloz (talk) 04:03, 9 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Assessment comment[edit]

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Innu/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

good strong basic writeup; could probably use expansion, some formatting, maybe some pictures --Skookum1 (09 May 06)

Substituted at 05:11, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

External links modified[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on Innu. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 04:46, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Innu&oldid=1207718227"