The etymology of translate is from the Old French translater and from Latin’s translatus “carried over” from trans “across, beyond” and lātus “borne, carried.” A similar notion is behind the Old English word it replaced, awendan, from wendan “to turn, direct.” To wend. What I didn’t realize then is that by refusing to speak Tagalog I was enacting my first attempts at translation, making sense of the dislocation I felt as an immigrant daughter translating my parents’ words into a language that symbolized belonging to me, even though I rarely felt like I belonged Pauline Johnson, also known by her Mohawk name, Tekahionwake, which literally means “double life.” It’s the only reserve in North America with all six tribes of the Iroquois, the names of which I learned by heart in elementary school: Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. We lived twenty-eight kilometers, or about seventeen miles, from the border of the Six Nations reservation, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada. Our rural town in Southern Ontario had two rivers running through it, a population of six thousand, and no one who looked like me. Perhaps that was my first attempt to navigate through white space as an immigrant child born into a cold country we lived near the Niagara escarpment and the Great Lakes, perpetually swathed by snow. When they wouldn’t comply, I stopped answering in their language I spoke to them only in English, which I learned in school. When I was young, I asked my parents to stop speaking Tagalog.
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