Background

The Mi’gmaq people first appeared in their homeland roughly ten thousand years ago. It is believed that their descendants crossed the Bering Straight from Asia into North America around 18,000 years ago. Before contact with Europeans, the Mi'gmaq were a hunter-gatherer people</ref>.

There are many different hypotheses on the origin of the Mi’gmaq name. It could come from ‘family’, or megamingo, meaning earth, or possibly nigumaach, meaning ‘my brother’ or ‘my friend’. According Ethnologue, Mi’gmaq is spoken by 8960 people in Eastern Canada and 330 people in the northeastern United States. The Mi’gmaq language is an Eastern Algonquian language that is in the same family as Delaware and Powhatan, to name a couple.

The Mi’gmaq that this wiki will concentrate most on is the Listuguj dialect. Listuguj is located in Eastern Quebec, right on the border of New Brunswick.