Altjematimgeol: Translating the Spalding Rules of Baseball into the Mi’kmaq Language

 

As was true in other Indigenous communities elsewhere, native peoples in the northeastern corner of North America played a wide array of traditional stick and ball games that celebrated “The Creator” while enhancing healthful recreation, physical skill, community solidarity and inclusiveness. In addition to lacrosse – by far the most ubiquitous Indigenous pastime – the native peoples in Quebec, Labrador, and farther north played games that were particularly suited to their environment. The Inuit, for example, played a form of baseball called Anaulataq on an often rocky landscape and sometimes on ice. To the south, the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island played Oochamkunutk, a traditional stick and ball game, in the summer, and when the winter came switched to a form of hurley on ice that they called Alchamadijik.

Over the years Mi’kmaq and Maliseet craftsmen in the Maritimes and Maine became especially proficient in fashioning both hockey sticks and baseball bats. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Mi’kmaq carvers had already developed an international reputation for the sticks they carved from the roots of alder and yellow birch trees. These lightweight hockey sticks, trademarked as the “Mic-Mac” hockey stick, were distributed across North America along with skates by the Starr Manufacturing Company of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Mi’kmaq craftsmen and the Starr hockey skate developed a reputation of quality in hockey equipment that rivaled that of the Spalding Company and its wide array of sporting goods.1

This explains to some extent the 1912 publication of Altjematimgeol: The Spalding Baseball Rules in Mic Mac. They were printed in Rimouski, Quebec, with the acknowledged permission of J.E. Sullivan, president of the Spalding Company. There is little indication of the project’s genesis, nor are there the names of those involved in the translation. The book was made available, however, by the manager of the Mi’kmaw baseball club in Rexton, New Brunswick, with the blessing of the Mi’kmaq chief at Burnt Cove.

Obviously a 31-page translation like this would have involved considerable time and effort, and it remains a wonderful resource for those interested in studying and maintaining the Mi’kmaq language and Indigenous sporting life.2 For the Spalding Company, the project was clearly in keeping with its broader interest in widening the acceptance and development of the sport and expanding the market for its sporting equipment. It also enhanced its array of baseball publications that included the annual official Baseball Guides and Spalding’s Baseball Rules. Spalding had an extensive sporting library at the time related to football, hockey, basketball, baseball, and beyond that to include physical culture, gymnastics, and healthful exercise.3

The publication of baseball rules in the Mi’kmaq language was important in delineating the difference between baseball and other stick and ball games that were played in Indigenous communities at the time. In the early 1990s, cultural anthropologist Trudy Sable was a research assistant on a project on Maritimes baseball funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Working from the Gorsebrook Institute at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Sable undertook a number of interviews with Mi’kmaq elders on traditional stick and ball games like Old Pussum (Old Fashioned).

Although the game’s origins are obscure, it was notable for its inclusion of everyone in the community, young and old, male and female, and for its celebratory and informal quality. People could enter or leave the game whenever they wished, and it usually ended with a feast. The influence of the British game of rounders was evident in the game’s development over time, with baserunners moving in a clockwise direction and being retired by being hit by the thrown ball.

As baseball became increasingly popular in the last half of the nineteenth century, it diverged from the traditional games like Old Pussum in a number of ways, becoming a competitive rather than communal practice, played by men rather than women and often involving competition with other Indigenous and subsequently non-Indigenous players. As Indigenous players increasingly showed up playing alongside non-Indigenous ballplayers, conformity to the standard rules of the game was absolutely necessary. For Mi’kmaq players, the publication of the Spalding Rules in their own language was a particularly important part of the game’s development in Indigenous communities throughout Maritime Canada.4

COLIN HOWELL is Professor Emeritus (History) at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Northern Sandlots (University of Toronto Press, 1995) and Hardscrabble Diamonds. Postwar Baseball in New England and the Maritimes (McFarland Publishers, 2023).

 

Notes

1 See Alan Downey, The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018); Colin Howell and Chris Fletcher, “Modernization Theory and the Traditional Sporting Practices of Native People in Eastern Canada,” Journal of Physical Education and Sport 19 (2), 1997: 79-84; Garth Vaughan, The Puck Starts Here. The Origin of Canada’s Great Winter Game. Ice Hockey (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Gooseland Publishers, 1996), 138-152.

2 ALTJEMATIMGEOL. Spalding’s Base Ball Rules in Mic Mac (Rimouski, Quebec: Imprimerie Generale S. Vachon, 1912).

3 In the same year that Altjematimgeol appeared, Spalding’s Official 1912 Canadian Base Ball Guide contained a lengthy section on baseball in the Maritimes and New England as well as playing rules and a diagram of a baseball field.

4 This project led to the publication of Colin Howell, Northern Sandlots. A Social History of Maritime Baseball. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). Sable’s research provides the foundation for much of Chapter Seven, “The Others,” especially pp. 184-95, which deals with the history of baseball and native people in the Maritimes.