On a warm, clear day in February, Brenda Germain picks up a large hand drill and asks her students to gather around.
Drill in hand, she shows the children how to cut through the thick ice covering Chaleur Bay, on Quebec’s Gaspé coast.
“Pase’g admire — the ice is this thick,” her colleague and aunt, Joyce Germain, tells the students as they kneel over the hole, hoping to catch some smelt, or kaqpesaw.
The class outing is being held entirely in Mi’kmaw — a language that Brenda Germain says she “didn’t speak a word” of, just a decade