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. In 1978,
Ives Goddard and William Fitzhugh of the Department of
Anthropology at the
Smithsonian Institution, contended that the pre-missionary system was purely mnemonic. They said that it could not have been used to write new compositions. By contrast, in a 1995 book, David L. Schmidt and Murdena Marshall published some of the post-missionary prayers, narratives, and liturgies, as represented by hieroglyphs—pictographic symbols, which the French missionaries had used in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, to teach prayers and hymns. Schmidt and Marshall showed that these hieroglyphics served as a fully functional writing system. indicates that "(a) French missionary stole our historical narrative with outlandish claims about our written language", and cites her Mi'kmaw grandmother (Lillian B. Marshall, 1934–2018) who stated in her "last conversation before she died, to make sure to tell “them” that we’ve always had our language," seemingly asserting that Le Clercq did not invent the script, and it had been in use by the people long before him. However, this seems to contradict the fact that after Le Clercq's return to France in 1687, the script had to be taught to other groups of Mi'kmaq by other missionaries, indicating it was not a script that the indigenous peoples already knew. ==History==