smuqw’a’
closest I can render in IPA (a colonial tangle if ever there was one, but the only thing that helps) it’s
Some dialects it’s smoke-wa, no soft ‘th’ at the end.
I spent part of the morning listening to what my consulting animal is called in many Indigenous voices; from the homophone of ‘Paul’ (yup, some solh temexw languages call a heron a word that sounds like ‘Paul’ which is funny to me) to the rolling assemblage of stately consonants and vowels that is the Kanien’kéha word for heron.
