BEYOND LOCAL: Anishinaabe elder uses online videos to instill a love of language in children

Barbara Nolan, an Anishnaabe elder whose mission is to promote her country’s language, says she loves hearing stories about how her work impacts children.

Nolan launched a series of online videos last month to introduce the language, called Anishinaabemowin, to the very youngest members of the community.

“I know this grandparent, she sends me a picture of her grandchildren sitting on the floor watching a big-screen TV,” Nolan said in a recent interview from Garden River First Nation, east of Sault Ste. Mary, Ont. “And guess who’s on the big screen TV? It’s me!”

In her videos, Nolan uses immersion techniques – instead of teaching the language, she encourages people to live it. Their content covers a wide range of topics from Halloween to animals to dorm plagues and is presented in a way that children can understand.

Nolan, 77, is an elder born in the Wiikwemkoong First Nation and a boarder survivor. Growing up, she said, she heard her parents speak only Anishinaabemowin.

“I didn’t hear my father or mother speak English,” she said. “And so we grew up with all this language – grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, you know, the whole community.”

Nolan says that many residential school survivors were deprived of their language, a dispossession that she actively resisted but that left an indelible mark on others.

“I would say they don’t want to say it – even today,” Nolan said. “They know it, but they don’t want to talk about it. It’s too painful for her. They believe that someone will come and do something bad to them…You will be punished if you speak your language.”

Trying to counteract this trend, Nolan has been working to revive and popularize the language since the early 1970s. She works as a language teacher at a daycare center in Garden River, playing with Anishinaabemowin children and introducing them to basic words. When the children she cares for first begin to speak, they sometimes use Anishnaab words in addition to English.

But these children, she said, are not immersed in the language; If they are not with her, they do not speak it – or hear it. “And I thought it was time for me to make videos in the language, funny videos, animated videos.”

So she teamed up with Esbikenh, a third-grade Anishinaabe teacher from Walpole Island First Nation who creates digital characters. Together they created online videos that were featured on TikTok and other social media; She even helped develop an application that teaches Anishinaabemowin.

Randy Morin, a professor of indigenous studies at the University of Saskatchewan, says there are about 63 indigenous languages ​​spoken in Canada and that in the long term there will likely only be three. “As you know, our populations are aging and they are the ones who still speak languages, and unfortunately we are losing their languages ​​very quickly,” Morin said in an interview.

According to Morin, a main reason for the loss of language is the federal government’s policies, including the residential school system. “But now it’s our aging population, our elders are dying so quickly and when they die we lose so much: we lose the language, we lose the values, our worldview, how to see the world and interact with the world.”

Indigenous languages, he said, should be made official languages ​​in Canada so they could receive funding proportional to the money invested in English and French programs across the country. “We lose our stories and somehow the meaning of such meaningful words, so we have to hold on to these languages ​​for a variety of reasons,” Morin said.

He added that indigenous languages ​​could offer answers to pressing modern questions. The world’s last biodiverse areas are owned and managed by indigenous peoples, he said, whose languages ​​are encoded with the techniques used to manage the territory. If these languages ​​are lost, the world could lose important knowledge about climate change and sustainable development.

Knowledge is “anchored in languages ​​and in the way we look at the world and how we interact with the world. So we have a lot to lose.”

Nolan tries to leave some of that knowledge behind. The first 10 videos were published online in August, with more to come. She wants to keep going as long as possible – and leave something behind that can stand the test of time.

Locals in Garden River have told her how much they like the effort.

“They’ll stop me on the street and say, ‘Barbara, my little granddaughter, she likes your video. She just loves you, you know,’ and that’s so rewarding for me to hear,” Nolan said.

“It’s for the kids. I did this for the children.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 27, 2024.

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press