Minnesota is celebrating 150 years of statehood. Some Minnesotans that is; for many American Indians, the sesquicentennial is a painful reminder of language loss in the last 150 years due to European immigration and federal policies of assimilation, alottment and relocation.

In an MPR article today, Red Laker Roger DesJarlait speaks about how learning the Ojibwe language is helping in the healing process: “First the individual heals, and then you heal the family and then you heal the community.”

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Interestingly enough, a different proposal for Minnesota statehood was advocated for just 16 years before Minnesota statehood in 1858. This proposal by Wisconsin Governor Doty would have made Minnesota an all-Indian state where white settlement was forbidden. The treaty wasn’t altruistic, but promoted as way to assimilate American Indians and provide a place for other states to send their unwanted Indians. Listen to the MPR interview with a state historian on the Doty Treaty.

Ojibwe culture, language and identity are all tied up together in a complicated knot. It is difficult as you follow the thread of one, to disentangle it from the other two; perhaps impossible, as they are all part of the same thread that runs through one’s life. What left of Ojibwe culture without the language, Ojibwemowin?

“Our cultures and our languages — as unique, identifiable and
particular entities — are linked to our sovereignty. If we allow our
own wishful thinking and complacency to finish what George Armstrong
Custer began, we will lose what we’ve managed to retain: our languages,
land, laws, institutions, ceremonies and, finally, ourselves. And to
claim that Indian cultures can continue without Indian languages only
hastens our end, even if it makes us feel better about ourselves.” writes Ojibwe author David Treuer in a recent Washington Post article (If They’re Lost, Who Are We?).

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines culture as “the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.” Dictionary.com calls it “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”

If Ojibwemowin ceases to become a feature of everyday existence, if the knowledge, world view and beliefs of generations which are contained within the very words of the language are lost, what then is left to distinguish Ojibwe culture from Ojibwe heritage or ethnicity? It’s a complicated and sobering question.

His brother Anton Treuer read a portion of a story from the book Living our Language during an NPR interview in April (Letter Men: Brothers Fight for Ojibwe Language). The story entitled, “Gaawiin gii-wanitoosiimin gidinwewewinaan” by Joe Auginaush speaks of how it is not the people who are losing the language, but rather the language that is losing the people.

In listening to him read that story, I saw in my mind a thread running through the twisted tangle of life, and the challenge to grab that thread and follow it back to the language, lest we become lost.

Or why we are so concerned about revitalizating for the Ojibwe language.

Language loss world-wide has reached staggering proportions as half of the estimated 6000 world languages are no longer transmitted to new generations of speakers. For indigenous languages in North America, the situation is especially critical. Krauss reported that only 13 percent of the 135 indigenous languages still spoken in North America are being learned by new generations of speakers (as cited in Crawford 1995, p. 18). (For more language loss stats, see the MIT Indigenous Language Initiative page.)

According to Fishman:
“In our day and age, it is definitely the globalisation of pan-Western culture ( and popular consumer culture) that is the motor of language shift. And since American-dominated globalism has become the major economic, technological and cultural thrust of worldwide modernization and Westernisation, efforts to safeguard threatened languages… must oppose the very strongest processes and powers that the world knows today.” (p. 6)

As global commerce draws the world closer, the language of commerce becomes the language of power – literally the language used by governments, media, employers and educators. Threatened languages are relegated to the roles of non-power positions of family, friends and community. (Fishman 2001) According to Hinton (2001), many people shift to the dominant language because, “A group that does not speak the language of government and commerce is disenfranchised, marginalized with respect to the economic and political mainstream.” (p. 3)

While globalization is increasingly pressuring languages worldwide, indigenous languages in the North American have endured more than 500 years of targeted eradication. European colonizers seized upon the eradication of indigenous languages as a primary method of empire building as early as 1492 (Crawford 1995). Systematic efforts at indigenous cultural and language eradication continued under United States federal policies and Christian missionary efforts.

The legacy of brutality endured by American Indian children from the 1800s through the 1960s boarding school period, and the removal of children to schools far distant from their homes (McCarty & Watahomigie 1998) continues to affect the vitality of indigenous languages. The assault on indigenous languages has left many American Indian people convinced that their language is second-best (McCarty & Watahomigie 1998; Crawford 1995), resulting in a situation in many communities where elders refuse to speak the language.

The movement to revitalize American Indian languages faces unique challenges political, emotional and geographic challenges. Due to past U.S. federal policies of termination, relocation and land appropriation, tribal people are scattered and tribal nations are fragmented onto reservations separated not only by distance, but also by each having an independent, sovereign tribal government. According to Hermes (2004), the boundaries make working collaboratively on language issues difficult. Remaining fluent speakers are rapidly aging, and often separated from each other by hundreds of miles.

Because American Indian languages have no national status and no cohesive geographic land base, there is nowhere else in the world to go to learn these languages (Hinton 2001). This stands in contrast to immigrant speakers to the United States, who have a homeland to return to – a place to go to learn their ancestral language. The strong push in the United States for “English only” initiatives fails to recognize the differences between immigrant and indigenous languages. And despite the passing of the Native American Languages Act in 1990, funding for language programs has been meager (McCarty & Watahomigie 1998). Scare resources force language programs to compete with health care, housing and economic development for tribal funding (Crawford 1995).

Perhaps the greatest challenge for American Indian language revitalization is combating the loss of culture and identity that accompany language loss, and the emotional stumbling blocks created by internalized racism and colonization. According to Hinton (2001), language loss is part of the oppression and disenfranchisement of indigenous people, so closely is it tied to usurpation of indigenous lands and the loss of whole cultures. Fishman (2001) writes that specific languages are related to specific cultures and their attendant cultural identities at the level of doing, being and knowing. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis supports this, stating that thought is governed by language. Language then is tied not only to its specific vocabulary and grammatical structure, but intrinsically to a world view and way of thinking.

Stephan Graymorning (1999) puts this into personal terms when he says:
“I am really worried if we lose our language we won’t be able to think in the Arapaho way. If we lose our language we will lose our ceremonies and ourselves because our life is our language, and it is our language that makes us strong.” (p. 2)

The survivors of attempted cultural genocide often strive to put pieces of their identity or culture back together, with language being key to that. However, being punished for speaking their language, many American Indians internalized the devaluation of the language in their own minds (Crawford 1995), leading to a present situation where many languages have “closet speakers” who choose not to speak because of the pain associated with it. Many saw their language as the reason for their suffering at school (Hinton 2001). “Language acquisition has become the strongest antidote I know of to fight internalized oppression,” writes Hermes (p. 59).

The state of Ojibwemowin

The Ojibwe language has approximately 10,000 speakers, mainly around in the Great Lakes area of Canada and the United States. There are fewer fluent speakers in the U.S., and most are elders in their 60s, 70s and 80s. While the situation for Ojibwemowin is better than for some other indigenous languages, such as the Dakota, who have only 10 speakers left in Minnesota, it is still critical.

Many dialects of Ojibwe are in danger of completely dying out. And the death of each fluent speaker is felt keenly. The knowledge, perspective and lifeways that are lost with the language are irreplaceable. But more than that, the identity of Ojibwe people is at stake. (For another perspective on this, see David Treuer’s essay: A language too beautiful to lose.)

What we are about here is standing against that rushing current of language loss. We know it’s a hard, upstream paddle. But we also know that it’s possible to succeed. It begins and ends with each one of us speaking Ojibwemowin each day. Ahaw, anishinaabemotaadidaa!

This week, we will be featuring some guest who are doing the work of Ojibwe language revitalization. We caught up with a number of them at the Minnesota Indigenous Language Symposium held May 12-13 in Duluth, MN. The work that they’re doing is exciting and inspiring, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

We’re glad you’ve found Ojibwemowin.com. Two years ago, a number of us enrolled in a tribal cohort for a World Language Revitalization Master’s of Education degree. The learning we’ve done and the relationships we’ve built along the way have been transformation to our lives. We’re really fired up about revitalizing indigenous languages. We want to continue to inspire each other, share our work, help each other, and keep in contact with others in the language revitalization movement. We invite you to join us.

We’ll be blogging regularly on happenings in the Ojibwe Language Revitalization Movement, the people doing the hard work, technology and techniques for language learning, Ojibwe language materials and anything else we think you might find interesting on your language learning journey.