"You don’t have to use the exact same words.… But it has to mean exactly what I said.” Thus began the ten-year collaboration between Innu elder and activist Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue and Memorial University professor Elizabeth Yeoman that produced the celebrated Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive, an English-language edition of Penashue’s journals, originally written in Innu-aimun during her decades of struggle for Innu sovereignty.

Exactly What I Said: Translating Words and Worlds reflects on that collaboration and what Yeoman learned from it. It is about naming, mapping, and storytelling; about photographs, collaborative authorship, and voice; about walking together on the land and what can be learned along the way. Combining theory with personal narrative, Yeoman weaves together ideas, memories, and experiences––of home and place, of stories and songs, of looking and listening––to interrogate the challenges and ethics of translation.

Examining what it means to relate whole worlds across the boundaries of language, culture, and history, Exactly What I Said offers an accessible, engaging reflection on respectful and responsible translation and collaboration.

Translator, editor and educator Elizabeth Yeoman is the author of books, articles and documentaries about language, culture, translation, walking, land and memory. Most recently, she co-translated and co-edited Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep the Land Alive (University of Manitoba Press) with its author, Innu elder and environmental activist Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue. She lives in St. John’s NL. 

Elizabeth Yeoman's profile page

• Winner, Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
• Long-listed, BMO Winterset Award
• Nominated, Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing

"A highly personal and intimate approach to broaching discussions around cultural understanding and traditional practices... this work goes beyond documenting and surpasses any conventional approach to scholarly discourse. Audiences who come to the book with open minds and open hearts will find the contents feeling enriched and intellectually challenged."

Alberta Native News

"Exactly What I Said is a useful addition to the body of literature on translation studies and its ethics and simultaneously a much more human story of two very different women finding ways to share of themselves across cultural boundaries, and how doing so can be an act of love, understanding and decolonization... Yeoman’s approach to translation is one that values care, attention to accuracy and an understanding that ‘the ways we use language are intrinsically related to the ways we live on the Earth.’ One can only hope that others seeking to translate Indigenous languages undertake the work with the same diligence and thoughtfulness this book offers its subject as well as its readers."

EVENT Magazine