ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ
About This Project
A journey from curiosity to creating bridges between healthcare and Indigenous language.
How This Started
My interest in Cree started in a pretty unexpected way. In 2019, my family and I went on a long road trip across Canada. At the time, I was living in Montreal and was really interested in geography, so we decided to drive west along the Trans-Canada Highway, all the way to Banff and Jasper National Parks.
On our way back east, while passing through Ontario and heading toward Québec, we stopped briefly at a roadside rest area. While we were there, I noticed a group of elderly people sitting nearby and talking.
At first, I thought they were speaking French. But the more I listened, the more confused I became. When we started talking to them, I learned for the first time that they were speaking Cree, also known as ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ (Nēhiyawēwin).
How That Curiosity Grew
That short conversation stayed with me long after the trip ended. As I got older, I kept thinking back to that moment. What started as simple curiosity slowly turned into a deeper interest—not just in how the language sounds, but in where it is spoken, how it connects to geography, and how language carries history and everyday ways of caring for one another.
I began reading, listening, and paying more attention to Cree language materials whenever I came across them.
About This Resource
This website is a personal project that grew out of that curiosity. I focus on building a resource for biology, medicine, and healthcare terminology in Cree.
This project makes imported medical terminology easier to find and trace to its source. Cree varies by community and region, so source context, dialect notes, and qualified language review matter when a term is used.
The original source uses English dictionary headwords such as “Face, your” and “Accident, has an”, with the main term first for alphabetical lookup. This site displays the text after the first comma before the main term in parentheses: “(your) face” and “(has an) accident”. The same display rule applies to all comma-separated qualifiers, not just “your”. Commas inside explanatory parentheses stay in place. This is a change to English presentation, not a new translation of the Cree.
Entries remain alphabetized by their main headword, such as “face”. The exact source headword is preserved and shown with the entry, and search accepts both source wording and the displayed wording.
This is not an authoritative or instructional resource. It's simply a space to document what I'm learning and to build a useful tool for Cree-speaking communities.
Who This Serves
Patients & Elders
Understanding diagnoses in a familiar language
Healthcare Providers
Explaining conditions clearly
Indigenous Students
Learning science in their own language
Language Keepers
Recording new descriptive terms
Vocabulary Scope
Sources and Review
Source wording is preserved, while generated writing and project review status are labeled separately. Proposed new or changed entries require both community and clinical review before publication.
Note: This is a learning resource. For medical advice, please consult qualified healthcare professionals.