Native tongue: MSU classes help Ojibwe language survive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Published November 13, 2007

[(Photo by MATTHEW DAE SMITH/For the Lansing State Journal) Preserving the
culture: Professor Helen Roy, originally from Manitoulin Island, Ontario,
teaches Ojibwe in a recent Michigan State University class. Damian Fisher,
an Okemos lawyer and a Saginaw Chippewa tribe member, said Roy's efforts to
save the language make her "a modern day hero."]

Native tongue: MSU classes help Ojibwe language survive

Matthew Miller
Lansing State Journal
http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071113/NEWS01/711130334/1001/news

The Ojibwe word that Autumn Mitchell likes best is "pkwezhigaans."

Literally, it means "little bread." Practically, it can mean cookies,
crackers or muffins. It's the same word for all three.

It's not a word she's known for very long, but she sees it as a part of her
history all the same or, perhaps better, a part of her heritage.

Mitchell, 19, is a member of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe, but she didn't
learn more than a few words of the language growing up. (Chippewa and
Ojibwe are fundamentally the same language.)

She's learning it now at Michigan State University, in part, because she
doesn't want it to fade away.

"Not a lot of people from where I come from speak the language anymore," she
said.

"It's kind of become, if you don't do this and if the handful who are
willing to do this don't follow through with it, we're going to lose it and
then we're going to be on the list of extinct languages.

"And how do you still constitute a nation if you don't have a language?"

Efforts to revive American Indian languages go back decades, but those
efforts are taking on a new urgency as the numbers of fluent speakers
decline.

The 2000 Census listed 8,350 Ojibwe speakers in the U.S., 1,270 of those
were in Michigan. Those numbers are almost certainly smaller now.

"These people who are in their late 70s or 80s are going one by one," said
Helen Roy, who is in her eighth year of teaching Ojibwe at MSU, "and each
community is saying, 'Wow, once all our elders are gone our language will
be gone.' "

"That's the scare that's being put to the different communities because of
the speakers dying, leaving and taking that language with them."

More take languages

But there is good news coming from college campuses, MSU among them.

According to the Modern Language Association, there were 25 percent more
students learning American Indian languages in 2002 than there were in
1998.

The increase was smaller, only 7.6 percent, for Ojibwe, a language spoken by
tribes throughout the Great Lakes region and inscribed in Michigan's
geography. Many of the state's place names - Chesaning, Ishpeming and
Pinconning, to name just a few - are Ojibwe words.

At MSU, where Ojibwe is the only regularly taught American Indian language,
Roy said she teaches perhaps two dozen students a semester, about half of
them from Ojibwe-speaking tribes.

And for those students in particular, the classes provide a link to a
heritage they often didn't fully know growing up.

A sense of heritage

Nichole Shepherd, 32, is a doctoral student in English who began studying
Ojibwe this year. In fact, she came to MSU, in part, because of Roy's
classes.

Shepherd is Odawa (again, the language is basically the same), but learned
only a few words growing up, "some animal names and different things, like
how to say, 'I'm hungry.' "

Her grandparents had been fluent, she said, but, like many of their
generation, were punished for speaking the language in the government-run
schools they attended as children, "so they didn't speak it to their
children."

Shepherd said she's always had a sense of a heritage that she couldn't quite
articulate.

"Now I want to know how to say it right, to say it truly," she said.

Most speakers over 60

Margaret Noori teaches Ojibwe at the University of Michigan, where more than
140 students are currently learning the language.

She estimated that more than 80 percent of fluent speakers are over the age
of 60.

"It wouldn't take more than one generation that's not paying attention" for
the language and the reservoir of cultural meanings it contains to
disappear, she said.

That makes teachers such as Roy, 59, who grew up speaking Ojibwe and never
stopped, rare and all the more valuable.

Damian Fisher, an Okemos attorney and a member of the Saginaw Chippewa
tribe, said Roy's efforts to save the language make her "a modern-day
hero."

"You've got to be vested in the theory or idea that language is the single
most determining element of a culture," he said. "I am, and, because of
that, her work is important and the work to sustain and revive the language
is important."

Much of his tribe's language and traditional culture remains, he said, "but
so much is evaporating."

And that's not an isolated phenomenon. Carla McFall estimates that, of the
4,000 or so members of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa, there are
only a dozen who are fluent in the language and most don't use the language
regularly.

That's part of the reason why the tribal government established the
Anishinaabemowin Language Program three years ago.

The program offers language courses, including classes at Harbor Springs
High School, and works to preserve the language through video recordings
and other documentation.

"Hopefully someday, we have a bilingual community," said McFall, the program
coordinator. "I'm sure I won't be here to see that, but I'm going to help to
plant the seeds."

Roy said she sees her own work in much the same light.

"Hopefully I'm playing a little part in the start of a revitalization and
resurgence," she said. "Hopefully, I put a little spark into somebody and
they say, 'I want to learn this.' "

"It's starting to happen, she said. "Not just with me, but all over."

Contact Matthew Miller at 377-1046 or mrmiller at lsj.com.

More on the Web
• Learn more about the Ojibwe language at www.ojibwe.net.

• November is National American Indian Heritage Month. For information on
historic places and links to cultural resources provided by federal
agencies, go to www.nps.gov/nr/feature/indian/Index.htm.
Related content from LSJ:

    * Ojibwe/English translation

Media files:

    * Helen Roy speaks in and about Ojibwe - MP3