Giving new life to her native language, Ojibwe (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Giving new life to her native language, Ojibwe
Dorene Wiese hopes to revive language and is president of the American
Indian Association of Illinois

Dawn Turner Trice
January 11, 2010

When Dorene Wiese was a young girl she would listen to the stories her
family members told as they gathered around her kitchen table.

Relatives often reminisced about harvesting rice, or more precisely
manomin, from the marshes of northern Minnesota. They told stories of
getting into canoes and using hand paddles to knock the grains into
their baskets. It was an annual event, filled with ceremony that
brought their Ojibwe community together as they worked to parch,
separate and clean the rice, before bagging it for storage.

Wiese (pronounced WEE-see), who's now 60 and is the president of the
American Indian Association of Illinois, said that although the
stories were robust -- as a child she easily lost herself in them --
she realized years later that because her family no longer spoke the
Ojibwe language, their stories may have lost meaning and color by
being told in English.

So Wiese, who has a doctorate from Northern Illinois University, has
been working for the last three decades to revive the language. Her
research is in oral history, and she has studied the ways in which
learning is passed down through generations.

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