Ojibwa immersion trail leads through Wisconsin

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This article was published 21/11/2024 (292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Kinew government is eyeing an Ojibwa education hub located south of the border as a model for training more immersion teachers and upscaling public school programs.

Earlier this fall, a group of civil servants made a trip to Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Institute in Lac Courte Oreilles, a reservation — as reserves are called in the United States — located near Hayward, Wis.

Government sources told the Free Press the aspirational goal is to grow Indigenous language immersion in Manitoba so it’s as prevalent as French immersion.

“In the very places where language was once silenced, today with the help of elders and language speakers, we are bringing Indigenous languages back to the classroom,” states an excerpt from the NDP throne speech delivered Tuesday.

The language expansion initiative is in its early stages.

Jackie Connell, previously a Métis school division administrator, joined Manitoba Education as its first assistant deputy minister of Indigenous excellence in January.

Connell is overseeing the development of curriculum frameworks for both Indigenous land-based education and languages. She led the delegation of bureaucrats and school division employees that visited Lac Courte Oreilles Sept. 29-Oct. 2.

“What our team saw is not only a thriving language and cultural revitalization project, but also a group of educators whose students score better than the statewide average on standardized tests,” Premier Wab Kinew said in a statement Thursday.

“We’re looking forward to applying these lessons in Manitoba to boost achievement.”

The world-renowned institute provides teacher training to develop fluent speakers of Ojibwa (also known as Ojibwemowin or Anishinaabemowin), creates curriculum and assessments and runs a kindergarten-to-Grade 9 school under one umbrella.

“We’re passionate about the language and making speakers is our goal. We want the community to speak it again,” said Lisa LaRonge, executive director and co-founder of Waadookodaading, which translates to “a place where people help each other” in English.

Thirty years ago, a dwindling number of mother-tongue speakers — no such members of Lac Courte Oreilles are alive in 2024 — led LaRonge and other residents to start researching what other Indigenous groups had done internationally to preserve their languages. They devised a local plan with elders and community speakers.

Waadookodaading began as a half-day immersion pilot in 2000, and became an official school the following year. Classes, all of which are delivered by Ojibwa staff and embed cultural activities, are held on the campus of tribally controlled, government-funded Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe School.

LaRonge, who studied her ancestors’ traditional language at the University of Minnesota (home of the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary), said the institute offers intensive professional development to equip teachers with high levels of proficiency in Ojibwa and immersion pedagogy.

Teachers have to learn on the job, given most were not raised in the language, owing to the fallout of the U.S. government’s Native American boarding schools and other attempts to assimilate their ancestors.

“We needed to be more than a school,” she said, adding a non-profit model allows them to train employees and design teaching materials while applying for grants to fund that work.

As it has grown and word-of-mouth has spread across the globe, Waadookodaading has begun doing “Indigenous outreach” — running tours and training for people hailing from elsewhere in Ojibwa country and outside of it.

The executive director’s advice to others wanting to follow their lead?

Develop pipelines to train teachers to work in immersion environments, sequence lots of curriculum and have a “really strong philosophical ideology.”

“English is everywhere. It’s so pervasive, so when you do this kind of work, you want to stay in the language. You want kids to think that you only speak the language so that they learn that they have to use it, too. It’s like a sanctuary, almost; you’re protecting an environment where the language is spoken,” LaRonge added.

Until Grade 4, 100 per cent of the school day is delivered in Ojibwa. Older students have one daily period of English Language Arts.

Drumming, singing and dancing are commonplace, and part of a weekly schoolwide assembly during which all 51 students gather together. Every day starts with students asking Manidoo (Creator) for help throughout the day.

In addition to literacy and numeracy assignments, students spend time on the land learning how to snowshoe, set snares and, during sugarbush season, tap trees to make syrup, taffy and cakes. Art projects include beading on velvet and making tobacco pouches.

Jason Bisonette, who holds leadership positions at Lac Courte Oreilles’ elementary school and new university, registered all three of his children in Waadookodaading.

When his eldest was in Grade 1, the boy was doing simple math equations in Ojibwa with ease. Upon his parents’ request, he paused mid-homework one day to consider the answers in English.

“It dawned on me at that moment that he had to think it all through in Ojibwe first, and he had to translate it into English. That moment was probably the first (of its kind) in our family in three generations… He was more connected to my great-great grandparents than I have ever been, and that was pretty cool,” Bisonette said.

He credits the immersion stream’s success to strong Ojibwa language teachers, who are few and far between in both the U.S. and Canada.

Three Manitoba public schools have bilingual Indigenous-language programs — Thompson-based Wapanohk Community School delivers lessons in Cree, northwest Winnipeg’s Riverbend Community School runs Ojibwa instruction and Isaac Brock School in the West End offers immersion in both dialects.

The Public Schools Act allows for up to 50 per cent of the instructional day to be in a non-official language in Grade 1 and up. Kindergarteners can study full time in language other than English or French.

“There’s waiting lists, and the waiting list seems to be growing every year. We could easily add more classes if there was more space and more teachers,” said Pamela Morrison, a cultural and language support teacher in the Seven Oaks School Division.

Morrison’s role involves helping colleagues at Riverbend, who have varying levels of fluency, find hard-to-come-by resources in Ojibwa and bolster their skills to support seven immersion classrooms with more than 100 attendees.

During the interview process, teachers are asked if they speak the language. If they are not proficient, they are asked whether they are willing to learn alongside their students.

Both culture and language are infused into everything, Morrison said, noting she encourages teachers to make the curriculum fit their classrooms rather than the alternative.

“The biggest impact I see is the pride in who (students) are and knowing that being Anishinaabe is OK,” she said.

Giinawind, meaning “this is us” in English, is the elementary school program’s motto.

The Louis Riel School Division does not have any Indigenous immersion classrooms but rather a communitywide “exposure program” that encompasses St. Boniface and St. Vital.

Every kindergarten and Grade 1 student in the division participates in an hour of Indigenous language programming per six-day cycle.

A mix of Ojibwa and Cree-speaking instructors are assigned to different schools, with 30 buildings involved in total. Michif is in the works, as well as an expansion to reach all K-3 pupils and run elective language courses in every high school by 2027.

Since people who have “the gift of language” are hard to come by, the division accommodates instructors who are not certified teachers by partnering them with classroom educators, said Corey Kapilik, director of school and classroom supports.

Above all, opportunities for people to learn Indigenous languages, including more post-secondary training options in First Nations, Métis and Inuit dialects, are key to growing these programs, Kapilik said.

Statistics Canada data show the number of First Nations people who could speak an Indigenous language in the Prairies dropped five per cent between 2016 and 2021, owing to an aging population of mother tongue speakers.

Cree dialects are the most commonly spoken of all the Indigenous languages in Manitoba, followed by Oji-Cree, Ojibwa, Dakota and Dene, which are tied in popularity, Michif and Assiniboine.

Kinew said the province is exploring ways to train more language teachers and connect more kids with the language of their community, be it Anishinaabemowin, Cree, Michif, Dene, Dakota, Anisininimowin (Oji-Cree) or Inuktitut.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca