One Team’s Mission to Recover the Indigenous Names of Ontario’s Birds

Joe Pitawanakwat’s partners have grown accustomed to his texting them strange questions at all hours. Which woodpecker digs all day? Is there a bird with something sticky on its beak? What does a shorebird have to do with fire?

Fascinated by birds all his life, Pitawanakwat has been on a particular mission for more than a decade: to collect as many bird names as he can in Anishinaabemowin, the traditional and endangered language of his Anishinaabek community in Ontario. By recovering these nearly forgotten words and piecing together which species they belong to, he and his collaborators, Andrés Jiménez Monge and Junaid Shahzad Khan, hope to help revive a way of understanding the world and people’s place within it—before it’s too late.

Anishinaabemowin is the language of the Anishinaabek people, which includes the Ojibway, Odawa, and Potawatomi. Like many Indigenous languages in the United States and Canada, it was nearly stamped out by assimilationist policies that, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, amounted to “cultural genocide.” A pillar of those efforts was sending Indigenous children to residential schools where abuse was common and where they were forced to abandon their languages. These days, a growing number of people are learning Anishinaabemowin as a second tongue, but few—mainly elders—are fluent enough to know the names of birds. 

Pitawanakwat unearths the names while traveling to remote communities to teach plant medicine as part of his outdoor education business, Creators Garden. While there he speaks with elders, making note of any birds mentioned. He and his partners, both of whom are non-Indigenous and trained in ecology, use clues embedded in each word to home in on which species they believe it represents. In Indigenous languages, the names of living things often paint a vivid picture of how humans are part of the environment. Plants, for instance, have names that describe how people can use them to heal from sickness, Pitawanakwat says. Similarly, a bird’s name often points to its behavior, appearance, sounds, or ecological role. “You could hear just within the names of these species that we were completely, absolutely, and utterly connected to bird observation,” he says. 

The woodpecker that digs all day, for example, is Mooningwane (the Northern Flicker), a nod to its ground-foraging behavior, unique among the region’s woodpeckers. And Gwiingwiish, the name for the Canada Jay, refers to its use of sticky saliva to attach food to tree trunks for storage. Both birds also feature in Anishinaabe legends that offer teachings about respect and reciprocity with nature.

So far the team has gathered words for more than 170 species. Once they have a hunch about which bird a name refers to, they fact-check it with members of Pitawanakwat’s family and Indigenous language experts. Sometimes the trio’s interpretations are met with laughter, but others earn consensus. The panel agreed, for example, that Meshkodejiichiishkwe, the shorebird associated with fire, is the Dunlin, with its rufous back and sooty belly in breeding season. 

Using this process, the team created a pamphlet in 2022 with the pronunciation and notes on the meaning and origin of 15 Anishinaabemowin bird names. The nonprofit Birds Canada has adopted the publication as an educational resource, and Creators Garden is selling it to raise money for the ongoing project; a new edition on winter birds is set for release later this year.

Tracking down more names, however, is increasingly difficult, particularly since all three partners also work full-time, says Shahzad Khan, an ecologist. The words for some birds likely did not survive efforts to erase Anishinaabek culture and language, he says, especially if they were not prominent in cultural stories. Still, the team is determined to carry on, says biologist Jiménez Monge: “We’ve systematically eliminated this knowledge, so to recover it for the sake of recovering it—it’s a good enough reason for me to keep going.” 

Members of other Indigenous groups, too, are beginning to reclaim bird names in their languages. Some of Pitawanakwat’s friends in Inuit and Haudenosaunee communities have adopted the approach his team developed. More broadly, a movement to revitalize culture, language, and ecological stewardship practices among Indigenous communities is gathering momentum across North America, says Noah Gomes, a Hawaiian researcher who has worked to salvage Hawaiian bird names and generate new ones.

For Pitawanakwat, recovering traditional bird names restores something more significant than a forgotten word or a bit of birding trivia. “All of these living things carry stories,” he says. “Embedded within those stories is knowledge, and all of that knowledge is here to help you live a good life.” 

This piece originally ran in the Summer 2024 issue as “Words to Live By.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.