I am Aboriginal. I’m not a good Aboriginal, but I am registered with the Canadian government. While growing up, I picked up a few Cree words from my mother but I never learned to speak the language. During high school, I found a Cree/English pronunciation guide and tried it out on my mother. I had her so confused that at times she forgot how to speak her language herself!

However, my incompetence with the Cree language isn’t only due to my lack of learning. Sometimes I’m just too lazy to learn how to say the word properly, or sometimes I’m just too inept to get the inflections right. And sometimes, my entire family has adopted the mangled word too!

The prime examples include:

• Pissonacat (pronounced “Piss on a Cat”) should actually be Attawapiskat. This is the name of my band. I coined the new name after getting tired of having to pronounce all the syllables for the proper word (among other reasons).
  
• Couchcaching. I don’t even remember if this is a Reserve, lake, river, or what. I found this word when I was at Casino Rama with my mom and sister. I didn’t realize that it was a real name – I thought it was a joke with the “caching” being the stereotypical sound of a slot machine. My sister laughed and immediately started making fun of me.
  
• Wannagosomewhere - I was recently wasting time looking to see how much it would cost me to fly from Montreal to Attawapiskat. To get there you had to transfer through a place called Waskaganish. Do you think I could remember how to say that word while talking with my mom on the phone? Wakasomething. Wakawhatsit. I kept saying "Wannagosomewhere" until my mom finally realized which reserve I was talking about. I thought she'd drop the phone she was laughing so hard.
  
• Go go gadget– I used to own a shirt that had really really wide sleeves. My mom and sisters called it my “butterfly” shirt. Somehow we started using the Cree word for butterfly. Well, my mom and sisters did. I could not for the life of me pronounce butterfly properly. To me, it sounds like someone is saying, "Ghoghomenahgeishish” but when I try to replicate the sound it’s apparently intelligible. Instead I gave up and started calling it my “Go go Gadget shirt.”