Maqenike (We Will Collect)
After my 2020 experience, I felt like we had all gone through something incredibly significant, energetically speaking, with the calculable heartbeat-like rhythm of the Earth in mind. I sensed an energy shift, one that I am not able to fully explain. In Native cultures, the term for this is Armageddon, which doesn't mean a full-scale annihilation, but rather an overturning of a status-quo pertaining to consciousness or everyday life (this is already getting wordy, isn't it?).
In this timeframe, for good or for ill, we became more intertwined as a global community than ever, based on extreme and opposing political views, if nothing else. But there was a lot more going on than just political debate. The airwaves and radio frequencies became saturated with the news generated out of the United States and it resonates so strongly, it is hard to come up for air and realize that there are other things happening. I would never claim to be someone who is fully cognizant of all current events, I live a rather solitary and sheltered life in many ways, but I do know that the things I have been keeping an eye on seem to have a global significance. So, I keep hammering on this nail (no reference to military manoeuvres intended) hoping I will eventually strike the right key to unlock all the things I see that are worth making note of.
To express what I was experiencing, I started a music project, as I've mentioned before. It was more of a language project, as a matter of fact, than anything else. I had a world of information to record, and condensing it into sound compositions was a simplified way of doing it, for me. The word collect, is an important word in the grand scheme of my music project, and it deserves a deep-dive style blog post in and of itself, but I am not prepared to direct you to the composition I am referring to at the moment. As soon as I remedy that problem, I will write about it. For now, I want to remind people that my project is inspired by THIS and it is meant to highlight some attributes of the Indigenous language from my region (Eastern Canada). As I skimmed through the Passamaquoddy Online Dictionary, which encompasses aspects of the language of the Wolastoqey Nations, in correlation to the research I was doing for my music project, I noticed one word in particular. It is the word Maqenike.
maqenike
Example Sentences :
| Peskotomuhkati-Wolastoqey | English Phrase |
|---|---|
| Ehtahs wen mehcinet, cu-oc wen maqenike. | When ever someone dies, someone will go around to collect. |
| Nit-tehc-ona 'tiyali-maqenikhotiniya weci-kisihpultimok elomi-tpuhkiwik. | Immediately (as soon as they find out about the death), they gather food for the wake. |
It caught my eye, so I clicked on it. It held a surprising meaning. It means he will collect , according to this language data base.
The Collector is a Nine Inch Nails song, for example. It is on the album With Teeth.
Looking at this word from a critical point of view, I broke the word down in several ways. The first obvious way is to do so according to its syllables. Ma / qe / ni / ke (pronounced ma kwa nee kay). And the obvious component of this word is the N I K E part. Nike is a Greek Goddess , the mythical Goddess of victory in battle.
As is commonly understood, the Greek language is only 3400 years old. However, the Passamaquoddy language is over 10, 000 years old. I kept sifting through this Language Portal and found quite a few little golden nuggets like this one that caused me to do an awful lot of thinking.
Without making this too twisty-turny, the other motivation I had was an attempt to dismantle a curse that was put on my maternal grandmother's family many years ago, but that is also another blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, I had a few personal reasons to take all of this very seriously. So I kept digging and sifting and digging and sifting.
In a nutshell, I started to wonder if the term for the Greek Goddess NIKE actually stems from the language of my region's Indigenous peoples and the word Maqenike, specifically? When it comes to rhythm, according to my experience in 2020, I was able to trace my own heritage back to this exact region, and on a larger scale, I wonder how much of everything else is actually derived from this seemingly original source? It is a very big questions with immediately recognizable answers if you know where to look. Somehow, someway, something guides me where to look. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is something I have been able to trace through music, language, generational trauma, and so on, like a thread winding its way through a maze.
And as for me? In 2020, one of the many things I experienced included the feeling of collecting souls of thousands upon thousands of children to help them find their way home and in order to express this experience, I made the album Maqenike under the banner of my music project Accihte. My intention was to record this experience as best as I could, in case I was unable to explain it somewhere down the road. I would like to remind you that it was around this same time that the Every Child Matters movement began due to the staggering amount of children discovered in unmarked graves from the Residential School systems. Everything was unfolding in the spirit realm, and therefore the realms of sound, in my mind's eye, highlighting the way home for those who were lost. I played the role of a beacon, or a guide post, or a lighthouse, I guess.
Thankfully, I have regained my ability to write and to explain myself and am happy to reiterate the premise of this album today. On the cover of Maqenike, I attempted to convey a big ship, by splicing two halves of the same photo together and lo and behold, it looked like a goddess of some kind, bringing home an enormous shipment of souls, represented by the branches of a tree, in correlation to nature and all living things ( I realize it would help if the album were available to refer to but is not, at the moment). In the meantime, it only solidifies my stance. We are all one, sailing onward to home, on a vibrational frequency upon this beautiful Earth of ours. She calls us back home and the origins of that rhythmic cry very possibly begin here, on the traditional lands of our Indigenous People of New Brunswick, Canada and surrounding areas, blooming outwardly through time and space.
In regards to this curse, when the question of authority is at play, I consider the premise of authority to be correlative to origins. The church, for example, tried to exert their authority over members of my family on my maternal grandmother's side, who immigrated from Scotland. They fled this authority as it represented religious persecution and came to Canada, on a perilous journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Other parts of my family, on my maternal grandfather's side, were already here. As these bloodlines intermingled, I eventually came along, but it seems I was born under a mighty burden, rife with tragedy under the dark banner of a curse, as I mentioned earlier. I took it upon myself to figure out by what authority the so-called Church had to place a curse on my family, which evidently effected us all, year upon year. This inquiry is leading me to some very interesting conclusions and at the end of the day, my conclusion is this; they have absolutely NO authority over me whatsoever based on the origins of language itself.
All that I have discovered within that investigation is what this blog is all about and collecting information is something I've been doing my entire life, in order to make sense of the death of my father so long ago.
There's so much more to say. Stay tuned.
_________________
Bathing in my papa's blood
Bare-boned and covered in red
Waiting on that evening flood
And I came on a ship on fire
To the seas you call your home
Climbed down from the highest spire
I disappear with the ocean foam
I collect all the things I need
I collect all the things I need
I collect all the things I need
I came in the name of the dead
To bring my neck to the blade
Come down where the tempests led...
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