Extensive efforts in language preservation underway by Lakehead University

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Fort William First Nation Chief Peter Collins highlighted the loss of Anishinaabemowin skills in his community during Lakehead University’s launch of its 10-year Indigenous languages revitalization initiative on April 20. The 10-year initiative for revitalizing Indigenous languages in and around Lakehead University’s campuses in Thunder Bay and Simcoe County was announced as part of its launch event for the United Nations Decade Of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032. The event also included a presentation on Anishinaabemowin by Bemidji State University Ojibwe professor Anton Treuer.

“We had a chief in our community that wrote a paper in 1967; he was our longest serving chief, and he predicted by the 1990s that the language and a lot of our culture and a lot of our teachings would all be lost,” Chief Collins says. “And he nailed it pretty close to being right, but our community is starting to rehabilitate our language and trying to rehabilitate our culture and our beliefs but it takes a decade of learning and a lot of work to do that.”

Chief Collins says he and other children from his community attended and continue to attend school in Thunder Bay.

“Even though my grandparents on my dad’s side spoke our language fluently, we didn’t get enough time to spend with them to listen, to understand, to pick up that language,” Chief Collins says. “Elder Gordon [Waindubence-baa], who has gone on to the Spirit World, reminded us as leaders that it is up to us to make sure our language is rebuilt in our communities. It’s an integral part of who we are as a nation, who we are as a community, and who we are as First Nations people in this country.”

Vicki Monague, a Lakehead University graduate student, founding member of Lakehead University’s United Nations Decade of Indigenous Languages committee, author of the 10-year initiative, and Beausoleil citizen, says the initiative is designed to provide institutional support for students, faculty, staff, and Indigenous partner communities for language revitalization.

“We’ve created a draft work plan for the next 10 years in five key areas,” Monague says. “What we’re looking at is increasing academic opportunities for language learning, both in formal and informal settings, we’re looking at creating Indigenous international solidarity networks for language revitalization.”

Monague says research and innovation for the three Indigenous languages taught at Lakehead University’s Indigenous Language Teachers Program, Anishinaabemowin, including four dialects, Anishininimowin (Oji-Cree), and Mushkegomowin (Cree), is another area of the the initiative.

“Included in that is also the Michif language,” Monague says. “It’s a language that our students speak and something that we want to work towards supporting the revitalization of. We’re going to ensure that we’re monitoring the status of languages so we can help communities preserve, protect, and archive their language samples.”

Monague says another area of the initiative is community engagement, continuing to build community-based partnerships with First Nations that are looking for technical support or support with proposal writing or research within their own community.

“The last [area] is environment, so environment really speaks about programming our two campuses for language revitalization and language practice,” Monague says. “We want to make safe and inclusive spaces for language learning to happen, so we’re looking at creating immersion spaces across both campuses.”

Monague says the Indigenous Language Teachers Program, which was originally launched in 1973 as the Native Language Teachers Certificate Program, is aimed at people who already have knowledge of an Indigenous language.

“When that program emerged, it was for fluent language speakers to become teachers,” Monague says. “We’re going to step even further by creating programs that are for people who don’t have any background in the language now so that we can develop people who want to learn the language in such a way that we know what they are doing in the classroom is authentic and true and represents the communities that they come from.”