KANESATAKE — Harvey Satewas Gabriel still remembers the first time he heard a preacher read Bible passages in the Mohawk language back in the 1950s.
He watched the United Church minister open the book and translate the Scripture into Mohawk straight off the page as he read, the words sounding like “honey” to the then-17-year-old from Kanesatake, Que.
The 83-year-old estimates it took him about 17 years, on and off, to complete the translation, including 58 books he translated single-handedly. “I kept going because when you start something for the Creator, you can't stop,” he said in a recent interview in the garden of his Kanesatake home. “It's so interesting. Every verse is different. I was wondering what the next verse says.”
His mother, Gladys Jacobs, was a residential school survivor who managed to avoid losing her language by speaking it in the schoolyard with her sister and friends, he said. After that, she would only allow Mohawk to be spoken in her home. According to Gabriel, one of the professors was astounded by the accuracy of the translation, telling him it was “side by side with the Hebrew.”Gabriel said that eventually, funding for the project dried up, and his translation sat on shelves for a few years until his wife of 56 years, Susan, decided to make a renewed push to get it published.
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