Video — Indigenous Languages Symposium — January 26, 2021

Transcript

Transcript of Indigenous Languages Symposium — Morning session, January 26, 2021

Length: 1:23:38

Gary Anandasangaree (GA): So, with that, it is my absolute pleasure to invite our keynote addressed - Best Practices in Curriculum Development. And we're honoured to have with us Dr. Lorna Williams, who has been working in this area for a very, very long time, and I would like to just give a broader introduction of her, if you would allow me. Dr. Lorna Williams Wanosts'a7 is Lil'wat and comes from Mount Currie, British Columbia. Dr. Lorna Wanosts'a7 Williams is Professor Emerita of Indigenous Education, Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria and the Canada Research Chair in Education and Linguistics, where she designed and implemented the Bachelor's and Master's degree in Indigenous Languages Revitalization. Dr. Williams helped to develop the writing system for Lil'wat and co-authored the first curriculum and learning resources for teachers to teach the language in school. These materials continue to be used every day. Dr Williams.

Lorna Williams (LW): Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a real honour and a real pleasure for me to spend time with all of you and to have this day started with three elders that will set us in a good way. And I'm happy to be able to speak on this topic. It's been my lifelong work. And next slide, please. [“Please” in Lillooet]. Next slide, please.

There are—this topic of reclaiming, revitalizing, maintaining, and strengthening our languages is a very broad topic, and I'll do my best in the time that I have. And I’m, the—I'm going to touch on these topics: curriculum, documentation, school activities, community activities, policies, access, teacher development, resource development, and media and technology. I'll speak a little bit about each one. Next slide.

Cause these are the topics that need to be included in best practice, and in the research that I've been doing on language, I visited communities across the entire country, all except for Inuit, and these are what I've learned. First, Indigenous languages curriculum, and I say languages because there isn’t—we can't develop just one curriculum, as they tried to do in British Columbia. It's really important that any languages curriculum that's developed—any language curriculum that's developed has to be based on agreed-upon goals of the language community, and up until very recently, many of the goals and the vision for the language has been exported—imported into the communities, and the communities have had very little say in what that curriculum is. So, the communities must be engaged. They must be developed with a consideration of the state of the language, because each of our languages is in a very different state of development and—from those that are—that have no more speakers in their communities to those communities that still have a number of speakers, not just Elders, but in all the different ages. So, each curriculum has to really have an understanding of what the state of the language is in the language community. And there must be agreed-upon—they must be aligned with the culture, the values, the norms of the language community. Right now, much of the curriculum that gets developed is translated from either French or English. And there are not—so when you translate a language curriculum from another culture, you're also bringing in their culture and values, and so it makes it feel like when we're learning our language, we're learning another language—we're learning English, for example. And it’s—so this is a very important and key point. And a number of years ago, about five or six years ago, I saw some curriculum that the Inuit people developed with the help of their Elders and Knowledge Keepers, and I was so happy and excited to see it and because it was so aligned with their culture and identity, their values, their knowledge systems. And but as I—but as the years went by, that diminished, and I really urge the Inuit to go back and to design the curriculum based on their world view. And I know that the people in the Northwest Territories have been working very hard to do this, and we're very fortunate because in many of the communities in the Northwest Territories, their language is still widely spoken. So—and the work that they're doing is incredible. And so, go to the places that have—that are developing curriculum from communities with a large speaker base. It's important that the entire community is mobilized to support the curriculum because the curriculum can't just be in a school or in a learning place, it has to engage and be a part of the community. Next slide, please.

Language learning, then, must be in multiple contexts. And so, when you're designing the curriculum, don't design it just within classroom walls. It must go beyond the walls. It has to include the land. Our relationship with the land is extremely important. And when we think of our languages as being born on the land, it's the voice of the land, it describes the land, and it informs us about the land. The language curriculum has to include land-based experiences—learning experiences, and because schools tend to keep our children away from their land, we need to be—we need to consciously build that relationship back in. Otherwise, our children grow more and more and more distant from their—from where they were born. It also—language lifts the spirit. And when we teach it and when we're learning it, and when we're conveying the language, we have to be mindful of the power of lifting the spirit. And when we lift the spirit, we energize the language and it—we learn to be who we are. It's important that in the curriculum that we have our ancestral stories because in those stories are—informs us about who we are, and the words that are in those ancestral stories are very informative about our cultural ways and our identity and it gives us lots of information about our world. They also need to be opportunities for young people to develop stories because in our world there were never only ancestral stories. Stories were emerging in every generation. And we need to continue that, and that was something that has been stopped. And there needs to be a wide variety of learning resources developed to support the language goal. Next slide, please.

Documentation and archiving is really, really important. Here on where I live, there are—a woman just passed away last week. I've known her for more than 50 years, and she's worked on her language in all of those years. She has created an entire, entire encyclopaedia for her language because she was documenting her entire life. That language is fortunate because they have all of this documentation of their language that they can continue to work with. And it's the same at the head of this peninsula, there’s a man, who was already elderly when I was just starting out, and he documented the language. And I watched that community draw on his knowledge. And he's been long passed, but his words and he developed the writing system for his language. He recorded not just the words, but also the names of all of the places in their territory. He constructed a way for people to remember those and to remember the stories and the songs that go with those places. And so, the people have a wealth of information because people like this man and a woman up island spent the time to be able to do this, and this goes across the entire country. There are people in many communities that have done this, and it's really important that we acknowledge these people, that we recognize them, that we honour them and thank them for the work that they did so that we can continue to work on our language. We have a good base because of them. It's really important that today we recognize that we have a very limited number of Knowledge Keepers that can work on the language and their time is full of demands. And so, we need to be able to respect their energy, their time, and their knowledge. And our people who are fluent speakers in many of our communities are aging, and I see them in the communities and there is so much demand. We have to be able to guard their time and energy. They want to help. They want to do things, and they know that their time is limited, but we need to be able to support them as they do this work.

And it's also really important that in each of our languages, there are multiple dialects that we need to respect. And I know that in many places, they’re promoted standardized learning to standardize a language to one dialect to make it much more efficient. But I want to encourage people to explore the ways in which they can create curriculum and learning resources respecting the multiple dialects in a language. And one of the greatest experiences of my life was when we were working on our dictionary. We put together a team, in our community, of people who spoke all of the dialects of our language, you know, because they had married in and they knew their language. There were—and there had been a time not too long before that when people knew everybody's dialect and were comfortable with it. And so, we invited these people, and there was just so much that we learned. And it was, for me, one of the greatest senses that I got was that our languages were very, very, very predictable in the changes from one dialect to another. And so, it’s—and so, knowing what those changes are, what the—is not difficult. And so, we can respect each other's dialects. We need to be able to make sure that in documenting that we protect—that we understand and know and put into practice and policy the protection of that documentation. And in British Columbia, First Peoples has been doing this. The Assembly of First Nations has created ways to understand this and in OCAP. And people need to understand this and to know it, especially in today's world. And so, as we collect knowledge, as we collect information, make sure that it's protected and in all ways—and in copyright and that kind of protection, and also in storage. We need to be able to develop partnerships with existing archives for access because we have lots of information in museum archives, government archives. And we need to have access to those. We need to be able to repatriate those data sources. Next slide, please.

Schools and educational institutions. We have to be able to develop curriculum from early, early childhood all the way to adults and into universities. We can't think of curriculum as just being one-size-fits-all. And I know that we're very fortunate that, for example, in Ontario, that the government—the provincial government there has created the fourth pillar of education—of higher education, enabling the Indigenous higher-learning institutions to be able to be degree granting. And, you know, so that gives us—they can show us the way that universities can be opened up, colleges can be opened up to better serve our languages and our people. And so, curriculum at all ages, for all uses, and all stages of the language. Next slide, please.

Community actions. There has to be an opportunity for not—for language to be in the communities, not just the schools where they've been so far. There has to be real, conscious, multiple-context building. The language has to be used in many, many settings, and I can see that happening, where language is brought to traditional land settings and traditional activities. It's also—it’s really important that our language is continued to be used in ceremonies. And in one community that I'm familiar with, they realized that they were no longer using their language in their winter ceremonies, and this was really hurting the people's spirit. And so they, along with a local university, they designed a program for Big House Speakers, and so that those Big House Speakers, they were young people, relearned—learned their language and began using it in the ceremonial hall and in the community gatherings. And I'm telling you that one program, that one action, lifted the spirits of the people and helped them to be mobilized and to do more. And so, it's really important to bring the language to many different activities. I talked about land-based activities. It's important that our language be used in every part of our territories to honour the spirits of our ancestors, the animals, the plants, and the water. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. I think they went to sleep.

Policies. We need to be able to look at policies—the Federal Government policies. And these are really, really critical, and I'm just so pleased that we have the Indigenous Languages Act, even though I know that it might not serve all of the Indigenous Peoples of our land in the way they want, but it's a good start. And it's important for us to review what the policies, and what the interpretation of different policies, are that affect our languages. And for example, one of the policies, in which the Federal Government has really only worked with our people who live on reserve. But now, many people have been pushed away from our reserve communities and have found their lives elsewhere. It's important that we really consider what the policies have been that have affected our languages and to begin to take action to remedy those. We need to look at provincial policies—the provincial policies of language exclusion—and to work with them. Here in British Columbia, the B.C. government has been working on a new Indigenous Languages Education Policy, and I'm hoping that that will give strength to the work that people are doing in public schools. There are institutional policies that affect us and one, for example, that I'm very concerned about and very familiar with is—are the policies that surround teacher education. Our—there is no room at the moment for preparing teachers—Indigenous languages teachers, and we need to be able to look at those policies, what we could do to create new policies, how to be able to maybe amend them and make them so that they support Indigenous languages. We need to look at associations that guide the work that people do. We need to be able to look at unions because the union policies can impede the way that we teach our languages in schools, and we need them to support the work that we're doing. We need to look at Indigenous organizations and the work that they can do to support us to support languages. We need to be able to look at bodies that provide credentials, and because right now, in many places, people who study how to teach our languages in school are not regarded as teachers, and they're not remunerated and compensated for the work that they do. And so, it's really important that we make those policies—that we address the policy concerns. Next slide, please.

Access. We need access for language for all learners, and we need to be able to build that into the curriculum that we teach and how we go about teaching. For example, we need to be able to take into consideration the people who are hard of hearing, people who cannot—who are blind and cannot see, and anyone who cannot access in an easy way our language learning. And there are many places across the country that have been trying to address this. There are groups that are—have designed an indigenous—a First Nations language—sign language, and sign language is part of our heritage. And so, we need to be able to bring those kinds of tools back. We need to be able to ensure that people who have been pushed away from their communities, who've become disconnected because of policies of removal and to help—to make sure that language learning is available to them and that they can access this. There are tools, curriculum, resources. Access by those who live away from their homelands. And we have that capability, and we need to be able to build this in. We make—we need to make sure that there is a team that uses technology to support learning, teaching, communicating, distance learning. Next slide, please. Next slide.

I talked a little bit already about teacher education, teacher development, and it's really important that across the country we design fully programs that are—where people are fully trained to be the Indigenous language teachers. The teaching of our languages is complex in so many ways, and we need to be able to spend the time to be able to make sure that they have the kind of broad program they need, with the tools they need, the understandings, and knowledge they need to be able to do the work that we're asking them to do. We need to be able to make sure that our teachers are fluent in their language and that they have many opportunities to be able to gain fluency and that it's ongoing. Here in B.C., we have, for example, a Master Apprentice Program in which people who are learning, people who are—feel that their language is a second language can regain—work with fluent speakers to be able to regain their language. And that's made a huge difference. And so, we need to be able to provide that for people who will be working on our languages. We need to treat our teachers with gratitude and with respect because right now, what I see across the country, and I’ve visited communities across the country. And it's not a kind situation. The strong feelings that people have about their language, they are projected onto the language teachers. And so we need to be able to protect to—I'm running out of time. So, teacher education designed for us. Next slide. And with understanding—next slide, please.

Resource development. I've talked a little bit about this. We need to be able to create lots and lots of resources, but create the resources—not translated from English and French. We need to be able to create the resources from our world view, from our languages, from our knowledge systems. Next slide, please. Next slide, please.

Media and technology. I spoke a little bit about these already. And—I'm sorry this is small, and I can't see. You know, technology—media and technology is the world that we live in today, and it's useful, helpful, but it also can be a way that distances us from our languages. And so, we need to be able to be careful about it. Media and technology is the new colonizer. And it was created based on other languages, mainly English, and they imposed that world and those values on us just the way that school curriculum has imposed a euro-western knowledge system on us. Technology is doing the same, and so, it's important and it's easy for us to lose control and ownership of our data and our knowledge systems through technology. And so, we need to be careful, we need to be thoughtful, and we need to be able to use and to learn the technology so that it can help us. Thank you very much for giving me this time. [“Thank you” in Lillooet]

GA: Thank you very much, Dr Williams, for that very informative session. We will bring you back for the Q&A. So, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and experience with us. I'm now delighted to welcome Sharon Parenteau to speak next. But before I do that, I just want to invite everyone, if you have questions, please go to the plenary button and you can pose a question to any of our panellists. You can do it through the plenary button—plenary Q&A. You can go to the chat room and pose a question there, or you can email info@Indigenous-Languages.org.

As you can appreciate, anytime we get into a discussion in languages, there's never enough time and we're trying our best to make sure that we get to your questions. So, we will do this after both of our remaining panellists speak.

Sharon Parenteau is a Métis educator from the Turtle Mountains in Southwest Manitoba. She has worked as a classroom teacher in Winnipeg's Inner City and a support teacher writing Aboriginal curriculum for the Winnipeg School Division.

Sharon also wrote the K-4 Aboriginal Culture and Language curriculum and the K-4 Social Studies curriculum for Manitoba. Sharon came to work for the Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF) on a secondment from the Winnipeg School Division to develop the Standing Tall Program and is now General Manager of the Louis Riel Institute. Sharon is a grandmother of six, who is her inspiration to make the education system better. She has received the Distinguished Leader in Education from the MMF, the Research and Curriculum Development Award from the Aboriginal Circle of Educators, and the Diamond Jubilee Award from the Lieutenant Governor. So, without further ado, Sharon Parenteau.

Sharon Parenteau (SP): Sorry, everyone. Hello. As you can see by my wintry scene here, I'm coming to you from Winnipeg, Manitoba. And as was in the introduction, I am the General Manager of Louis Riel Institute (LRI), and LRI has been the culture and education arm of the Manitoba Métis Federation and carrying out Michif projects for the MMF (Manitoba Metis Federation) for at least 10 years. So, Louis Riel Institute and Gabriel Dumont Institute actually hosted the initial Métis Nation engagement sessions that took place prior to the act being developed. I would also like to share that I never grew up speaking Michif, but my parents hosted one of the first Michif revitalization initiatives in the southwest region in Manitoba. It was held in their living room and with our elder Verna Demontigny as one of our teachers. Very few Métis citizens have had the experience of growing up in a household where the Michif language is spoken. There's a real danger of losing the richness of vocabulary and meaning that comes from using our languages in daily life. Next slide, please.

Our language is embedded in culture, values, and our ways of being. Just like Dr Williams said, culture—our language has to be embedded in that. So, Métis also speak Cree and Saulteaux, but to teach it, you need to have it embedded in Métis culture, not First Nation culture, which is often how the curriculum is developed. We have established that we are one of the three Indigenous recognized—People recognized in the Constitution. Yet, we've never received a third of the funding. In fact, we only receive a fraction of it. We know that Michif is more critically endangered than Cree, Ojibwe, or Inuit languages. And we need to set up a system that works because we're running out of time. The approach can't be pan-aboriginal. We need to focus on a distinctions-based. Next slide, please.

We know that, according to UNESCO, the language is critically endangered. And each time we gather, we realize how many speakers we've lost. We know our youngest fluent speaker is 65 years old. Every year we're losing more speakers than we're gaining. And our speakers are telling us they feel more and more isolated and are losing the ability to practice their language. It needs to be rights-based and as Indigenous People, language is our right. We have worked hard to ensure our rights are recognized. So, in 1982, when the Constitution was repatriated, the Section 35 rights looked at what the Métis also needed. And so, since then, though, we've been a political football between the province and the Federal Government, and no one has taken responsibility. Therefore, we've lacked funding in every sector, including language. Since that time, though, we've won significant cases such as the Powley case, the land claims case, and the Daniels case, which has led us to now having more funding for a number of things. One of the issues that we've always had with language funding is that it has been project based, and it happens every year. Currently, the year-by-year project-based funding is limited. We need to have—it's very difficult to keep people for more than one year when we actually—okay. So, let me say that again. We have difficulty keeping valuable people in languages because we only have year-to-year funding. So, this year, for example, our funding is up March 31st. Those people who are going to lose their job in March, they're going to be looking for another job instead of us being able to secure them for multi years. So we also—so it shouldn't just be project-based funding. It should build capacity as well. We need to invest in people, so that they actually see themselves as an investment for long term. Next slide, please.

One of the things that we need increased resource sharing, and Dr Williams touched on this as well. In GDI, or Gabriel Dumont Institute, which is our sister organization in Saskatchewan, they've been doing a great job at this for years, and the work that we've been doing has been very piecemeal because, again, it comes back to the project-based funding. We couldn't even write curriculum. Like, that wasn't something that was allowed with the funding. So, we've done very piecemeal work in this area. But we received funding recently from Library and Archives Canada to do some digitization of our languages. And that's one of the things that we've heard so much. We have to digitize the language. The other thing that we've heard so much is that we need to collect more samples of that language before those speakers are gone. So now, we are concentrating on archiving and indexing those resources on a new platform called Mukurtu, which is a digital archival platform that can be accessed by communities. So, we're super excited about these new initiatives that we're working on. The other that—I know that there's going to be a breakout session—five is going to talk about immersion courses, but that's actually one of the things that we also need to work on. We need to have language camps for families and for budding learners. We need to look at different sample—examples of language camps and immersion programming. We need to be able to bridge the intergenerational language use between grandmas and babies and so on. Next slide, please.

We also need to be able to use Michif language in public spaces. We need to normalize language learning. We have to have incentives for employees who learn the language. So, for example, if you're fluent in Michif, you should be receiving additional pay because you're a more valued employee. Employees should be able to learn as part of their job, and we do have some programs like that, but not nearly enough. We do have—the MAP funding that we received doesn't actually support language learners, so we need to be able to pay language learners to learn the language. We also have to have frontline workers being trained in the language, so if you call the MMF, you would have somebody greeting you in Michif. We need to have more people speaking the event. We need to have signs translated. And we also, which we do not have yet, we need a standardized spelling system for Michif. We do not have that yet, but bigger than that, we need to have—to increase the infrastructure. So, we need staffing, we need space, we need technology, we need language sharing platforms, and we need to build capacity. Next slide, please.

Our language speakers need to be supported, and I know Dr. Williams talked about this as well. We need—we have so few people that are speaking the language. We tend to go to the same people over and over again for their knowledge of the language. And we need to properly compensate those people. We also need to have increased collaboration between our Métis Nation Language Institutes, and educators should be supported. Next slide, please.

So, the other part of what we need to do is we need to be able to pair speakers and learners in a full live-in mentor apprenticeship program, providing income to both. We need to ensure that the richness of vocabulary and meaning is not lost, and there is a record of our language in its entirety where learners can hear the words in context of how they're spoken in daily life. Right now, we're doing a Michif word of the day on our website and we just need so much—it's a great start, but we just need so much more than that. If only we could have our young people who want to learn the language to be able to stay with a Kukum who's actually just going to speak the language all the time. We also need to substantially increase the number of learners at all levels of proficiency. So, GDI and LRI act as guides for emerging Métis Nation Language Institutes and Initiatives. So, we have the capability to do that. We've been doing that for years, and we need other people who can also lead in this initiative. We need to also support learners in creating space in their lives that they need to take the time to develop real fluency. It has to be a push from everyone in order to make this happen. Next slide, please.

Another thing Dr. Williams talked about was language banks and the lady who had the encyclopaedia. What an exciting thing to be documenting the language for 50 years. I mean we've been doing it piecemeal, but at least we have some material collected. So, we need language banks to create audio and video records, particularly on topics where gaps have been identified. So the Louis Riel Institute is currently administering two Michif language revitalization pilot projects. One of the projects aims to document, digitize, and archive Michif language samples. We ensure the richness of vocabulary and meaning is not lost, and that there's a record of our language in its entirety where learners can hear the words in the context of how they're spoken in daily life. The other project aims to promote revitalization of the Michif language by providing education on the topic of language revitalization and promote community centred Michif language revitalization planning. Manitoba has recently developed a Michif language revitalization community circle and has been seeking out champions across the province, and I think you'll hear more about this in one of the breakout sessions. LRI will be developing a Michif community language assessment as well—a tool that will assist the LRI in better understanding the needs, resources, capacities, and interest levels of Métis citizens across Manitoba. Next slide, please.

We also think that we need to expand existing apps and online dictionaries. David Morin will be talking about this in more detail in his session, but we already have created a few apps to support language learning. And it really has the children excited to be able to use technology—engaging the young people. We also need to establish an innovative fund to support ideas that have not been tried before. So, as a nation, we have had numerous discussions about how to make funding sustainable. We also need to consider possibly setting aside money each year into an endowment where we can just spend the interest and not the principal. Next slide, please.

Oh, and look at me. I am done and under time. So, I will turn it back then to the Parliamentary Secretary. Thank you very much for allowing me to share our work in Michif.

GA: Thank you, Sharon. Very, very informative, again. And we look forward to hearing from you again at the end during the Q&A session. For those of you, if you have questions and comments, please feel free to go to the plenary button and pose a question. You can also pose it via our chat or email at info@Indigenous-Languages.org.

And our final panellist for this afternoon is Alan Ojiig Corbiere, and he is an Anishinaabe from the M'Chigeeng First Nation in Manitoulin Island. He was educated on the reserve and then attended the University of Toronto for a Bachelor of Science. From there, he went on to study at York University and earned his Master's of Environmental Studies. During his Master’s studies, he focused on Anishinaabe narrative and Anishinaabe language revitalization. Mr. Corbiere has studied the Ojibwe language for many years and has attained some measure of fluency. For five years, he served as the Executive Director at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in M'Chigeeng, a role which also encompassed acting as curator and historian. Subsequently, Mr. Corbiere worked on a curriculum project teaching Anishinaabemowin as a second language at Lakeview Elementary School in M'Chigeeng. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the History Department at York University. So, without further ado, Alan Corbiere.

Alan Corbiere (AC): [Greetings in Ojibwe]. My name is Ojiig. And In Ojibwe, that means the fisher, not an angler. It actually means the animal that is of the weasel family. I—as they mentioned, I’m actually part of—I was part of the Lakeview School Program, and we delivered and created a program called Anishinaabemowin Revival Revitalization Program. And in that program, we actually took a different tact, and we—what we noticed is that we actually found that the—we wanted to take a different approach to our language curriculum. We, as Anishinaabe people, use what we call Wiingashk, and that's called sweetgrass. So, we wanted to say that we want to braid these three strands and the three strands are we preserve—and you heard Dr. Williams talk about this—that you record your speakers, correctly document their words, and create a database of topics. The second strand is you maintain your language by speaking your language. And we heard from our Michif saying that—speaker saying that we needed their people to actually speak it—continue to speak it in different places, public places, and also to write your language. That's an act of maintenance, speaking and writing your language and reading it. And then, we also need to revitalize it—create new words, create new spaces to use the language, and compose new stories. So, this was our way, our philosophy.

And we ended up using an analogy because our Anishinaabe People not only used sweetgrass, but we also use what we call Naaknashk. These are reeds, and we use these reeds to make mats. These mats used to be, of course, on the floor, but also used to be used to cover our wee ones. But they also were used to make baskets. So, the analogy that we developed was that these Bullrushes are found in a natural environment, but they represent thematic units based upon the months of the year. So, in September, your first unit is back to school. October—in a second language classroom, I'm talking about—not immersion. This is a second language approach to learning and teaching in usually most on-reserve public schools, but also off-reserve public schools. So, the first unit is September, and it's back to school. In October, it's Thanksgiving and/or Halloween, or Tasewang, which is All Souls’ Day, and in November is Remembrance Day. But what the—the analogy is that each of these strands, as you see on the image there, there's nothing holding them together. You learn all the vocabulary for that unit and then you basically toss it aside. So, we wanted to consciously go and make our next—go ahead there. We wanted to—Yes. Okay. I’ve got too many buttons going here. Sorry. We wanted to actually show that the other part of the analogy, and what I call this presentation: Weaving Anishinaabemowin Throughout the Curriculum. So, the analogy was then that we actually weave through all of that vocabulary and try to find what are the commonalities of each of those units, which they call basically special days per month. And that's how the curriculum has been designed for years—anyway, that I've seen on not only Manitoulin, but in the region. That is based on the special days of the calendar—school year calendar. So, the methodology of Anishinaabemowin Revival Program is to take these individual thematic strands and weave grammatical concepts and high-frequency vocabulary throughout to create a mat. Thus, binding thematic cultural units with language to create a mat of Anishinaabemowin retention. So, the idea is to close those strands off and to make—to work towards retention and acquisition.

I was always—years ago, I read the Royal Commission on Aboriginal people, and I was always taken by this diagram. It was—I read a report there by Yvonne Hébert, but she had referred to a report written by Arlene Stairs. And this is a diagram that is taken from her work. And it's basically showing that native culture inclusion and native language inclusion are intimately tied and that your cultural basis as you move along actually will increase. So, where we basically are is those first two steps: limited cultural inclusion—when we're actually talking about public school education and/or on-reserve public—on-reserve language education as a second language, because we're still more or less following the provincial curriculum and adding in—we're starting to add in more Anishinaabe or Indigenous content, but we're still not at the broad cultural base. So, you see, the native language is taught throughout—on the bottom, but then you—as each part you increase, you add in more. So, content material. And this content material actually means like you add in the special days. That's what the culture inclusion is. So, we talk about the Feast of the Dead on—instead of All Souls Day and then the content material.

The next one: narrow cultural base, you add in the ecological context, and that may be where you actually start to talk about place names and refer to place names a bit more and then talk about the importance of water and land. And then when you expand it even further, you get into the social process, and this is a big one because our actual—our kinship system actually doesn't work the same way as the English kinship system. So, you have the word ‘cousins,’ but you actually have two different sets of words depending on whether or not they're your same clan. But we don't teach that, and we have to teach that. So, that would actually be part of the social process of expanding our cultural base.

And then, lastly is that cognitive process. Our language is an agglutinative language—what's called an agglutinative language. In that case, it's similar to Latin, but Latin actually is agglutinative in the sense of noun-based words, whereas Anishinaabemowin is actually cognitive based—I mean, agglutinative based with verbs. So, in this case, we actually would look at how and teach that based as—switching from verbs—from nouns in English to verbs in Anishinaabemowin. That's what our goal is in this second language curriculum.

So, I'm having a problem with this thing here. I guess I went too far. Yes, there. That's the slide I want. So, we call this basically the well. I just made that up. It’s—and we’re actually looking at the—there we want to actually—this is based again on the preserve, maintain, and revitalize. So, we're looking at archival Ojibwe documents and then we look at recorded elder interviews as well as archival English documents, and we put those all together, but we have to process them. And then, in order to process them, you make local cultural resources, but also regional cultural resources. Here, this is a story that's taught in English—that’s been written in English a number of times, and it's the legend of the birch tree—why the birch bark tree has stripes on it. And it’s written—the Cree language has one, and the late great artist Daphne Odjig wrote one. And then, there's also another version in this other book by—collected from M'Chigeeng First Nation, Rama First Nation in Ontario. Anishinaabe people there. And it's about, again, the birch tree. But what we did find is an archival document. I found an archival document, and this is, actually was, recently published by the American Philosophical Society, and this legend was actually written down in the 1950s by a man named Fred Ettawageshik. And you see there he's dressed in his—with his headdress on and you see his clan there, his Ettawageshik clan, Piipiigwe, which is American kestrel. And he wrote down these stories in Ojibwe—I mean, Odawa, which is very similar to Ojibwe. But, that system that he used of writing is actually an obsolete orthography. So, what I had to do was actually go through that and then transliterate it into how we write today. What we use is a double vowel orthography. So, again, Elder Williams talked about this. That the importance of using our own stories in teaching our students is the important part. Not only to transmit language, but also we—what we took in the Lakeview School Anishinaabemowin Revival Program was to actually strive to transmit the language knowledge cultural nexus, not just language as it’s—on its own as a disembodied entity. We see—we saw language intimately tied, but you have to actually tie it to the land-based activities. And again, Elder Williams was talking about this, and they're saying that how the classroom actually estranges students from the land. So, you gotta actually make this—make it a bit more explicit how you're going to do this. So, one is you actually take those stories that the Elders tell and then also complement that. So, this is a video I want to show you. And hopefully this works. This is an Elder from [speech inaudible].

Elder in video: [Third-party video in Algonquin language].

AC: So, the really cool thing about that story—these two stories. Actually, the story by Fred Ettawageshik was one called Why Birch Trees Grow in Clumps, and what he—basically, the short, long and short of the story is Nanabush was carrying his canoe. Nanabush is our culture hero. Some call him Wisakedjak, Gluskabe, and Napi. But, for Anishinaabe people, that's Nanabush. He's carrying his canoe and then he bumps a tree. Then he bumps another tree, and then they—he gets mad at the birch trees because they are the ones that actually knocked him around. So, then he started chasing them, and they all got scared. They all ran off like a—in a group. They were trying to run away from Nanabush, and then they went to hide. The other story that we talk about in the same collection, but also those other three books, was that afterwards, when Nanabush caught up with them, those birch trees, he took a pine—some say a pine tree, some say a spruce tree, and he whipped that birch tree for disobeying him. And then, there's another version where he loses his eyes. Anyway, that makes that birch tree striped. And what that elder was talking about there is, he says, “look at this” and he cut that birch bark off. He harvested that birch bark. He says, “this birch that grows in the clumps within the spruce tree is no good for making crafts.” And he showed how it was—you saw those black marks on there because the, that gaawaandag, that spruce grows right against that birch tree. So, it makes it there an impression, and it leaves a black mark. So, you can't actually use that for crafts. And that's what we're doing there is looking at harvesting birch bark for to make crafts there. So, again, what I'm going for there, what we were trying to go for there, is to teach the students when to actually harvest birch bark. And it's a time, some say, when the strawberries come up and then others have other markers when that birch is going to just pop open when you slice it, and you don't kill the tree by that.

And then also—here to my last slide. Did it let me do that? Yes. So, the idea there is—what I've noticed is that we teach language, and our previous speaker talked about word of the day, and we did that too. And then, you look on Facebook and other social media platforms and you see these words of the day. But my thinking is that we're still stuck on words of the day. But we actually—what we're striving for is actually to have our stories told and our knowledge told in a complete package. And so, that's why I've been recording Elders and hopefully recording Elders doing land-based activities in order that then the teachers make a lesson to prepare the vocabulary as they actually go out on the land to use that vocabulary and then to actually have additional support when they're away from the classroom that they actually look at this online. And when they look at it online, they just look at our website there, Mchigeeng.ca/Anishinaabemowin, and you'll see those videos. And—but we weren't able to put up all of our lesson plans. We put up quite a bit of them. The attitude we had was, we're not going to make money off of this. So, we want people to use this for free and have it accessible to them and we want them, hopefully, everyone to use this stuff. The Elders that I worked with were also of the same mind. So, we wanted actually—you see that one diagram from the previous slide was it went from sounds, and we have these sound charts that were very popular. And they would have this syllable chart: ba, bi, bo, be, ta, ti, to, te, ga, gi, go, ge. You have all these charts, and that's what's still being taught. The sound system. You actually get stuck at teaching the words and then—but then you get into words are actually sentences. But we don't really seem to get right into the stories. So, our philosophy there—what I was doing, I didn't know I was doing this, but they call it backwards design. So, I was actually taking the stories of the Elders and then breaking up into sentences, words, and then the sound parts. So, we tried to put those two together. And again, there was this idea, this analogy, of weaving things together so that the students would have this stuff reinforced because we always talk about land-based activity, but a lot of these land-based activities sometimes occur in June and July and August. So, we actually have to make units that they can do with their parents or their grandparents or whoever else that speaks the language. So, I know I'm over time a bit, but Sharon bought me a couple of minutes.

GA: Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Alan. Again, adding a great deal of perspective to our discussion today. So, we have all three of our panellists who are back here: Alan Corbiere, Sharon Parenteau, and of course, Dr. Lorna Wanosts'a7 Williams. And Mathieu is here as well to assist with some questions. So, Mathieu, is there a question that we can start off with? We have about 10 to 15 minutes for this discussion. You're on mute.

Mathieu Courchene (MC): And that's my classic Zoom mistake. So, we have a question here for Lorna. My question for you is this: you have talked about the importance of teacher training. I see this as an ongoing process. I've been a language teacher for 20 years, not always at the same language, and I need just as much training and time for professional development as I've ever had. How can the ongoing training and ongoing resource development be fit into funding models? Interesting.

LW: It’s—there needs to be dedicated funding for Indigenous language teachers. But the funding is only—and the funding needs to go to support people who—number one, who are developing their language. There needs to be funding for the language program, so that the language programs are designed to suit the students who are taking the courses. So, for example, the Bachelor's Degree that I designed in Indigenous Language Revitalization, the first part of the program occurs on—in the language community because it's important for the language community to see the development of the students. And so, there needs to be funding to support the language, you know, that's taking place off the campus of the university. But then, there needs to be opportunities for students to be at the university so that they can access the supports and the resources that are needed—that they can access that are found at a university that—to support language learning. And so, there needs to be funding to support students to travel then to the university. And then to do the, you know, the many other programs that students might require. And, because it's a new development, it's a new—a whole new area of study. And, in most universities, there’s no—there aren't any spaces for Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous languages, and those need to be created. And so, there needs to be funding—additional funding for that.

MC: I guess it speaks a little bit about the current funding model. Maybe Sharon might have some insight in terms of the funding—how schools are funded and how teachers are funded and how they get, you know, compensated for the work that they do and the professional development side. So, I guess you're speaking really about a new type of structure to support teachers themselves, beyond just the university. So, I guess you graduate as a teacher, you go into a community, and then they say, “well, we'd like you to teach Anishinaabemowin.” So, I guess the question is: how do you train and, you know, I guess surround that teacher with the right—the resources that he or she needs to teach it? Maybe, I don’t know, Sharon. Go ahead, Sharon.

SP: Yes. I would like to speak to that because one of the things that we have in Manitoba is we have the Blueprint for Indigenous Education and teacher education in particular. How do we actually teach language teachers has been a topic that we've had for so many years? Because one of the suggestions that came out of our discussions was that perhaps one institution could focus on teaching the language instead of everybody kind of doing it piecemeal and doing a little bit here and a little bit there. But the other thing that's really disheartening is, and I won't name which institution it was, but we went and met with the Dean of Education in one of our institutions, and we said, “you need to stop pushing out all these education students. There's like four hundred a year that you're pushing out and you need to stop doing that.” And he said, basically, “we can't. It's our cash cow.” We said, “we need Indigenous cohorts.” We need cohorts that actually teach the language because often we find language speakers and fluent speakers, but they're not necessarily teachers. So, I mean that’s like we're all fluent—well, maybe we're not all, but we're fluent in English. That doesn't mean each of us can go to Japan and teach English, right? Like, it's one thing to be fluent in the language, and it's another to be a teacher. So, you have to actually try to bridge that gap, and it has to be the Eurocentric institutions that are actually supporting us as well.

MC: So, I guess that's just the challenge, right? You have these institutions that are set up. They have the ways of compensating their workers. They have ways of training them or surrounding them and how they do it. I don't know if, Alan, you have any insight, but how do you break those kinds of institutional barriers and perhaps, you know, surround teachers with the resources they need? And I'm also thinking about what Alan was talking about: how the language will evolve, like how a language will—you know, new words come into the vocabulary. And how do you stay on top of those kinds of things to bring those back to your students? I don’t know if, Alan, you have anything you would like to add.

AC: I'm no longer at this program, actually, and it’s basically because of funding as well. So, the funding is always going to be an issue. But one of the things that I've been really impressed with is in the last little while—like, I started trying to learn this when my wife and I conceived our eldest daughter, and that was twenty-seven years ago. So, I've been working at this for a long time, but I was never able to get fluent enough to actually pass it down to my children, and that was my goal. But, what I actually have seen lately now is there’s younger people that actually have just the tools that they've been using now are—have expanded. And when I started, there wasn’t as much resources as there are now. And as well as the pedagogy, and these guys are going to the University of Minnesota to a fellow named Brendan Fairbanks. And then there's an adult immersion program at—called Ojibwemotaadidaa: let's speak Ojibwe to each other. And it's at the Fond du Lac, and they go there for the month of July and they just—the young adults speak to each other. And then there's a group here in Ontario called [Algonquin language] and that means the new speakers, and they're young adults as well, and they just got the drive to do it. And it’s kind of—but, actually, the one thing that's happening that people will say is, they’ll kind of disparage—a lot of people will disparage post-secondary education, but actually the ones that are in [Algonquin language] and the ones that are at Brendan Fairbanks program, they're all being university educated people. So, you see where people are actually achieving success, demonstrable success, and it's with innovative programs like Brendan Fairbanks, University of Minnesota, but also the [Algonquin language] Program. And then, lastly, what I wanted to say is this one lady I know—she's younger than me. She has two young children. Like, they're like age five and three. She isn't fluent, but she's actually—she’s doing what I never did, and this is where I made the mistake: is she actually tries to speak whatever she knows to her children, and she's actually garnered all this stuff online. Her name's Rochelle Allen, and she ends up getting all this stuff online, and she teaches whatever she has. She teaches her two children, and her two children are actually speaking Ojibwe back to her. It's not perfect Ojibwe, but they actually speak a lot more than your average first-year university student who is enrolled in an Ojibwe program.

MC: There was a question here for Sharon. What is the web-based dictionary platform that you mentioned?

SP: You know what, my suggestion for that is to listen to David Moren's presentation, which I'm not exactly when he's on, but there is one called Michif To Go. And there's a couple of them that you can just download from the App Store. They're on—in the Apple Store. But, I mean, this work really has come out of Saskatchewan, so I'm not exactly what the platform is, to be honest.

MC: The other question they have for you around specific language projects that you carried out that bridged the intergenerational language gaps.

SP: Well, the first one that I talked about was when they taught Michif in the—must have been the 80s in my parents’ living room, where they had grandmas and grandpas and mums and dads and aunties and kids of all ages sitting around. And just like Dr. Corbiere said, like the young ones pick it up really quickly and so when they're here and they're listening, it's the adults who are pushing the initiative, but it's the little ones that catch on. And I guess the other thing is that when I think about—I am a qualified French teacher, although I would not be speaking French to anyone because if you don't use it, you lose it. And that's the same with any language, right? And so, when I went through university, I actually took how to teach the language. And one of the things that they made us do was go and make fruit salad with the kids at the daycare, but you can't use any English. Like, you can only use French words with them, right? And when you're actually instructing someone in the language—partly it is your hand gestures. It's all of those things that you use that help get the language across. And then, my final thing was I had to go Trois-Rivières and live there for six weeks, and my family never spoke English. And by the end of it, I could answer the phone and take a message. And I—they talked about a glissoire, which I didn't actually know. I just phonetically wrote down everything that I heard because I didn't know all the vocabulary. And they said, “oh, yes, the slide. The little play set is coming tomorrow.” They totally understood the message that I wrote down, right? So, that's part of immersion, though, right? Where you have to actually be having a real, live situation and just talking normally. And so, we need more of that. We need more instances like that. But, the biggest thing for us is all of our speakers are getting so old that they're so few and far between. We can't just call somebody up. I have northwestern Ontario asking me for resources and I said, “Okay. How many speakers do you have there?” “Well, we don't have any.” Okay, but how, then, can I help? How can I support you if you don't have anybody modelling the language, right? Somebody has to model the language, and intergenerationally is the way to go.

MC: I guess when you speak about that Sharon, you talk about immersion. I only know for myself if I’m not using the French language or I'm away from it for six months or you don't have any opportunity then you're looking for words. But it takes real quick in terms of like three months of being immersed in it, and then suddenly you're speaking as fast as everybody else. So, I'm wondering about those kinds of supports. I'm thinking about the communities that still speak the language all the time. I'm thinking it's Atikamekw communities in Quebec that, you know, the language in the band council, it's all Atikamekw. I'm thinking about northern Quebec and Ontario in terms of the Cree speakers. Still, everyday language, maybe also in terms of Ojibwe and other—I'm not sure exactly B.C.. B.C. is a unique world unto itself in terms of where the languages are, but I'm wondering about that opportunity to be immersed. Is there ways to create these structures and fund these structures where a teacher can do professional development by going to an immersion program, right? So, I don't know if that's something that's possible within current funding or is it something we have to look for in the future? I don't even know if that's a question. Go ahead, Lorna.

LW: Well, here in the Okanagan, they developed what they call a language house. And so they created—they established a house where people can go and live and be a part of like a family, you know, that they form and they speak only the language. And so—and I think that—and some go out onto the land and spend time, you know, two weeks, on the land and they speak only the language. So, I think that people are very creative in establishing different ways. But the other thing that I wanted to bring up, another example of supporting new language workers, you know, people who are going to work on the language starts—has to start at a very young. And there's a community that I know where they identify young people in Elementary School who are really taking to the language. And they—and that's our traditional way in which we support, we mentor, we guide young people, you know, when we see that they have an interest and, you know, a proclivity for something. And so, that's what they do with their language—people who are working in language, and they've been doing this for quite some time. And they provide—and they give them a label. They say that they're language apprentices. And so, they, the older people, the adults in the community, recognize these young people and they support them and they give them opportunities to, you know, do the work and then support them and provide them the kind of education they need in order to be able to do, you know, to move into working on the language. So, they start very young. And now, for example, in this community, the young people began a language immersion program that's now, I think, up to grade six, and they are very active in many different ways. And so, it's a community effort. And you have to start the preparation at a young age.

MC: Thank you for that, Lorna. I'm cognizant of the time, Gary. I think we'll have to wrap up our Q&A, so the chair is yours.

GA: Thank you, Mathieu, and thank you all for your presentations. So, Dr Williams, Alan, and Sharon, thank you very much for the information. I know there's a lot that we—you covered, but there's a lot more we could talk about today. But what's important is the conversation continues. So, for all of the participants here at the symposium, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for the work that you do. I, myself, am a settler. My family came here from Sri Lanka and I, myself, struggle with my own language, which is Tamil, and passing that on to my two daughters. Alan, what you were talking about earlier. It's a constant, constant struggle. But, when we talk about Indigenous languages, we know that the work needs to continue in a much more robust way and the Indigenous Languages Act and what's going to come as a result of the act I think is very—is going to be instrumental in making the required changes that we need to make to support the revitalization of the languages. So, thank you for the work that all of you do. Thank you for your teachings and thank you, Mathieu, for organizing this. And I look forward to seeing the great work that you do in person at some point.

SP: Meegwetch.

AC: Meegwetch.

MC: Meegwetch. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Parliamentary Secretary Alan, Lorna, and Sharon. Meegwetch everyone for your participation. I'm kind of liking this virtual thing. Never have to travel anywhere. Meegwetch to everyone.

[end of transcription]

Page details

Date modified: