Description
The Mi'kmaq are a First Nations people of the Northeastern Woodlands, indigenous to the areas of Canada's Atlantic Provinces, primarily Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, and the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec as well as Native Americans in the northeastern region of Maine. There are 66,748 Mi'kmaq people in the region as of 2023. n southwestern Nova Scotia, there is archaeological evidence that traces traditional land use and resources to at least 4,000 years. The Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Pasamaquoddy nations signed a series of treaties known as the Covenant Chain of Peace and Friendship Treaties with the British Crown throughout the eighteenth century; the first was signed in 1725, and the last in 1779.
Language
They speak Mi?kmaq, an Eastern Algonquian language. Once written in Mi?kmaw hieroglyphic writing, it is now written using most letters of the Latin alphabet.
Culture
Mi’kmaq social and political life was flexible and loosely organized, with an emphasis on kin relations. Mi'kmaq had lived in dispersed interior winter camps and larger coastal communities during the summer. They next harvested spawning herring, gathered waterfowl eggs, and hunted geese. By May, the seashore offered cod and shellfish, and coastal breezes brought relief from the biting insects. Autumn frost killed the biting insects during the September harvest of spawning American eels. Smaller groups would disperse into the interior where they hunted moose and caribou. The most important animal hunted by the Mi?kmaq was the moose, which was used in every part: the meat for food, the skin for clothing, tendons and sinew for cordage, and bones for carving and tools. Other animals hunted/trapped included deer, bear, rabbit, beaver and porcupine.