author
Silas Tertius Rand
1810–1889
A 19th-century Baptist minister and self-taught linguist, he devoted much of his life to studying the Mi'kmaq language and culture in Atlantic Canada. He is especially remembered for recording Mi'kmaq stories, including the legend of Glooscap, and for producing dictionaries, translations, and other language works.
1 Audiobook
The Dying Indian's Dream: A Poem
by Silas Tertius Rand
About the author
Born in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, in 1810, Silas Tertius Rand worked as a teacher and bricklayer before being ordained as a Baptist minister in 1834. In the 1840s he took up missionary work among the Mi'kmaq of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, a calling that grew into a lifelong commitment to learning and documenting the Mi'kmaq language.
Rand became known as a linguist, translator, and ethnologist as well as a clergyman. He compiled language materials, translated religious texts, and wrote down oral traditions at a time when relatively few non-Indigenous writers were doing this work in such detail. He is often noted as the first person to record the Mi'kmaq legend of Glooscap.
He died in Hantsport, Nova Scotia, in 1889. Today he is remembered as a complicated but important figure in Canadian literary and linguistic history, both for his missionary career and for the lasting record he left of Mi'kmaq language and storytelling.