Wolastoqey Dictionary Grew From Pandemic Project Into A Website & Book

What began as a quiet pandemic project has grown into a 424-page dictionary, an online database of 22,000 words, and a powerful act of language preservation. Roseanne Tremblay Clark’s Words from the Crow Clan is more than a book—it’s a family legacy and a testament to the resilience of the Wolastoqey language.

“I started when COVID hit five years ago,” said Tremblay Clark in an interview with the NB Media Co-op. “I got to thinking, ‘What am I going to do with myself?’ So I started looking through the language materials I’d accumulated over the years.” With more than three decades of experience in language work, she realized she had an opportunity to share something lasting.

Rather than undertake the project alone, she reached out to her nine siblings with an idea: a family dictionary. Every one of them said yes without hesitation.

Together, they began the process of sorting through memories and rediscovering the words of their youth. Some came easily; others sparked long, heartfelt discussions. “It was really quite fun,” Tremblay Clark recalled. “We had a lot of laughs and just a lot of memories coming back.”

Before the print edition, they launched an online version on December 2, 2023, with 6,000 entries. It has since grown to over 22,000, each with audio clips to guide pronunciation.

But Roseanne soon realized that some Elders—many of whom don’t use computers—were being left out. To ensure accessibility, she published 1,000 hard copies of the dictionary, funded through Heritage Canada. Because of the terms of that funding, the books couldn’t be sold. She has been giving them away, with only about 100 remaining.

“We’ve been giving it to all the Wolastoqey communities—in schools, libraries, to Elders and speakers,” she said. “People are interested in it.”

Roseanne hopes to release a second edition in a few years, incorporating the thousands of new words added to the growing online dictionary since the first book was published.

Language, for her, is deeply personal. “That’s the first language I heard when I was growing up,” she said. She remembers selling newspapers door-to-door in the 1960s, hearing Wolastoqey spoken in every home. “It was everywhere.”

Her brother, Wolastoq Grand Chief Ron Tremblay (spasaqsit possesom), also contributed to the dictionary. He shared a vivid memory of playing baseball as kids, using Wolastoqey on the field to outsmart opposing teams. “We didn’t really need hand signals... the other team wouldn’t quite get what we were saying. That was the gift of the language.”

But that gift, Roseanne warns, is in jeopardy. “We all know our language is dying. We have very few speakers. In my community, we might have less than 80.”

She urges young people to immerse themselves in the language as much as possible. “Every time I lose a speaker, it breaks my heart. They take a chunk of our dictionary with them, and we’ll never get it back.”

Ron echoes the call for urgency, advocating for immersion programs and better funding from governments and communities alike. He believes language revitalization is possible—but only through collective effort. “Before we all pass, we need three things,” he said. “We need our language to talk to the ancestors, our death song, and our traditional spirit names.”

Roseanne also stresses the importance of unity. With two major Wolastoqey writing systems in use, disagreements sometimes arise within the community. Her message: “There’s no right or wrong to this... We have the same goal. How are we gonna do this all together?”

With Words from the Crow Clan, Roseanne, her siblings, and her community are doing just that—preserving not only words, but wisdom, memory, and identity for future generations.

Anna-Leah Simon is a St. Thomas University student and a member of Elsipogtog First Nation. NB Media Co-op staff reporter David Gordon Koch contributed video editing and production. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada, administered by the Canadian Association of Community Television Stations and Users (CACTUS).