Aacimotaatiiyankwi

Have you ever wondered how we referred to ourselves in the past? Did we call ourselves ‘Myaamia’ as we do today? Or was there another term used? The word we are introducing in this blog post is mihtohseenia “human, person”. The word is made up of four pieces that give a literal translation of how we saw ourselves, shown below:

miht ‘bare’ + ohsee ‘walk’ + ni (unknown) +  a (‘special’ noun category) = to walk bare

Traditionally this was the word we used to refer to ourselves; simply as human beings. The first part of the word, miht, means ‘bare’. The second part, ohsee, means ‘to walk’. The third part, ni, is an unknown piece that we’re still trying to understand. Finally, the last piece, a, is our way of distinguishing between the two kinds of nouns we have in Myaamiaataweenki. This noun in particular is considered special, which puts it in the same category as humans, animals and more. We have a blog post on animacy if you want to learn more about the two types of nouns.

This word is a good example of the descriptive nature of Myaamiaataweenki and how we viewed ourselves in the world. As time has gone on, the meaning has changed to reflect distinctions between groups of humans. Sometimes, mihtohseenia is also used to mean ‘Native American.’ If you would like to talk about groups of people, rather than just one, you can say mihtohseeniaki.