Mi'kmaw are a Canadian First Nation whose homeland, called Mi'kma'ki, overlaps much of the Atlantic provinces, specifically all of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and parts of New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These glyphs, or gomgwejui'gaqan, were derived from a pictograph and petroglyph tradition,[1] and are logograms, with phonetic elements used alongside, including logographic, alphabetic, and ideographic information.

Scholars have debated whether the earliest known Mi'kmaw "hieroglyphs", from the 17th century, qualified fully as a writing system or served as a pictographic mnemonic device.

In the 17th century, French Jesuit missionary Chrétien Le Clercq "formed" the Mi'kmaw characters as a logographic system for pedagogical purposes, in order to teach Catholic prayers, liturgy and doctrine to the Mi'kmaq.

[5] Father Le Clercq, a Catholic missionary on the Gaspé Peninsula in New France from 1675, saw Mi'kmaw children writing "marks" on birchbark and then counting them to help in the memorization of prayers.