The Innu / Ilnu ("man", "person") or Innut / Innuat / Ilnuatsh ("people"), formerly called Montagnais from the French colonial period (French for "mountain people", English pronunciation: ), are the Indigenous inhabitants of territory in the northeastern portion of the present-day province of Quebec and some eastern portions of Labrador. They refer to their traditional homeland as Nitassinan ("Our Land", ᓂᑕᔅᓯᓇᓐ) or Innu-assi ("Innu Land").
Their ancestors were known to have lived on these lands as hunter-gatherers for several thousand years. To support their seasonal hunting migrations, they created portable tents made of animal skins. Their subsistence activities were historically centred on hunting and trapping caribou, moose, deer, and small game.Their language, Ilnu-Aimun or Innu-Aimun (popularly known since the French colonial era as Montagnais), [...] is spoken throughout Nitassinan, with certain dialect differences. It is part of the Cree language group, and is unrelated to the Inuit languages of other nearby peoples.
The "Innu / Ilnu" consist of two regional tribal groups, which differ in dialect and partly also in their way of life and culture:
- the Ilnu, Nehilaw or "Western/Southern Montagnais" in the south, speak the "l"-dialect (Ilnu-Aimun or Nenueun/Neːhlweːuːn), and
- the Innu or "Eastern Montagnais" ("Central/Moisie Montagnais", "Eastern/Lower North Shore Montagnais", and "Labrador/North West River Montagnais") live further north; they speak the "n"-dialect (Innu-Aimun)
Both groups are still called "Montagnais" in the official language of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Development Canada. The Naskapi ("people beyond the horizon", ᓇᔅᑲᐱ), who live further north, also identify as Innu or Iyiyiw.
Today, about 18,000 Innu live in eleven settlements within reserves in Québec and Labrador. To avoid confusion with the Inuit, who belong to the Eskimo peoples, today only the singular form "Innu / Ilnu" is used for the Innu, members of the large Cree-language family. The plural form of "Innut / Innuat / Ilnuatsh" has been abandoned. (wikipedia)
This one started out in not terribly promising fashion. I always (usually always) try to start by digging into the short stuff in the NW and then using that traction to catapult myself into the rest of the grid via the longer answers. Does that metaphor work? I have no idea. It's very early. I'm just going to say "probably" and move on. In today's puzzle, that short stuff was looking pretty grim. I just hit repeater after repeater after repeater: SOL ESOS SSN ... stuff you see all the time, often innocuous stuff, but when you get a bunch of crosswordese up front like that, well, my experience is that it's often a tone-setter. A harbinger. But thankfully I was disabused of that idea very quickly. Think of the crosswordese as the fuse that set off the fireworks, because right after I took this screenshot:
And I breathed a sigh of relief, or maybe the kind of sigh you emit when you're watching spectacular fireworks (really trying to make these metaphors happen today). Aaaaah. ISLE OF SKYE. Beautiful in reality, beautiful in my grid. And then, after this initial burst of color, things really went off:
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And voila, there I was, very much in my Friday Happy Place, with snappy long answers just shooting across the sky (the grid is the sky now, keep up!). The grid is structured in such a way that you do get a lot of short fill but that fill is in support of six (6) (!) grid-spanning 15s as well as a couple of 10s and a couple of 9s, so there's payoff! Payoff in the form of SECRET MENU ITEMS (man that clue makes me miss my home state of California ... if only it weren't constantly on fire). And the short fill is mostly well handled. INNU looks like it should be crosswordese, but I've never seen it (to my recollection), and since it's culturally inclusive, and the crosses are all very gettable, I don't mind it at all. And I learned that the INNU are entirely distinct from the (much more familiar-to-crossword-solvers) INUIT (see "Word of the Day," above). So, cool. There was one bit of new short fill, however, that wasn't handled nearly as well.
So, I know who CHIKA is (32A: One-named rapper with the 2019 video "Can't Explain It"). I love CHIKA. I listened to her "Industry Games" album (so good) over and over during the pandemic, on my (many, many) long walks around the tri-city area here in the Southern Tier of NYS. Now is she crossword-famous? I dunno. The clue suggests "not really," not by traditional crossword standards, but I don't think chart success or major music awards should be the only determination of crossworthiness. So I like seeing her here. A lot. I do not, however, like the cross on her "K," i.e. NIKE. Or, rather, I do not like the clue on NIKE (23D: Daughter of Styx). And I'll tell you why. Who the hell knows NIKE's parentage? OK, you do, genius, but who else? I can tell you that I had NI-E and I wrote in NILE. Why? Well, Styx is a river, NILE is a river ... so NILE. And I knew CHIKA, so I changed it, but most people didn't spend last year listening to CHIKA on repeat as they walked around their city pondering existential questions of life, death, and time, all while contemplating the manifest unworthiness of humans to inhabit this planet, so ... I could be very wrong here, but it seems like solvers could easily make that NILE mistake. Or some other mistake I can't see. CHILA seems like a name a one-named rapper could have, why not? You have to be so so so obvious with your "K" here because CHIKA is not well known, but instead of giving us the shoe brand NIKE (which is how most people in the world know NIKE), or giving us something better known about the goddess NIKE, we get this obscure-ish Styx clue. This is bad editing. If you are dealing with proper nouns that are likely to be unheard of by a huge chunk of your solving base, every single cross on that proper noun should be flashing red, and you should hand all the clues on those crosses appropriately—no room for doubt, if the solver is able to get it down to that last letter! No Room for Natick! This is the philosophy! Otherwise, just make it CHINA / NINE and move along.
[LET 'EM!]
Overall, though, I was not
IRATE about anything in this puzzle. No
ANGER. I had a very good time. Loved the clue on
LEGS (58A: Streaks on the side of a wineglass), and the queering of the normally French-clued
FEMME (14D: Queer designation). The fill is genuinely wide-ranging in the cultural territory it covers, and it all comes in at a typical, doable Friday difficulty level. All in all,
REALLY SOMETHING. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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