How the UMNs Native Studies Department is preserving a culture

The Wake talks with the American Indian Studies department to learn about the Ojibwe language preservation and what it means to Native American communities.

BY MAYA BELL

What happens to a society when their language is taken?

What happens when you try to revive it?

In Minnesota, the Ojibwe tribe is one of the largest tribes in the United States, with almost 320,000 people. Despite the size of the tribe, the Ojibwe language is considered an endangered language by the American Society of Linguists. This is due to the United States and Canada’s history of cultural erasure. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, there are about 523 known Indian boarding schools in the US, with 24 of them being in the state of Minnesota. The native boarding schools were meant to assimilate native children into European culture and erase all traces of their original culture. Decades after the boarding schools closed down, the American Indian Studies department at the university is attempting to keep the Ojibwe language and Ojibwe cultural traditions alive.

The movement to revive the Ojibwe language started at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s. American Indian students and faculty proposed a curriculum of historical and contemporary American Indian issues along with language classes for Dakota and Ojibwe.In June 1969, the Minnesota Board of Regents approved the Department of American Indian Studies and is now located at Scott Hall by the Mississippi River.

Zoe Brown, a teaching specialist for the Ojibwe Language Program knows the work that the American Indian Studies Department has done for the classes. “Even before there was a department of American Indian Studies department here, people were teaching the language classes, so there were Ojibwe classes through the nineties and the 2000s,” said Brown. As a black teaching specialist, she originally learned the language from the University of Minnesota, “It’s a beautiful language.” she said. In Ojibwe, beautiful roughly translates to miikawaadendaagozi. Now as a teacher, she recommends that students collaborate with one another using a resource called the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary.

In recent years, the American Indian Studies department continued to expand and revitalize. In 2010, the American Indian Studies Department collaborated with the Minnesota Historical Society, Ojibwe leaders, and the University of Minnesota libraries to create the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary(OPD). The OPD functions as a dictionary and a website to preserve historical traditions, which can be accessed at https:// ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/. On the website, there are links to photos of Ojibwe tribes and testimonies from Ojibwe people about their time in different historical eras.

Zoe Brown, says that learning the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary is a great resource. “It’s hugely important. The OPD lets you hear from all of these different elders and native speakers. It’s a great learning tool. It can be this hub to maintain and share the speaker language.” Of course, the creation of the OPD didn’t come with challenges, Nicholas Deshaw, a beta tester for the OPD said “At the time when it was being launched I was a part of the beta group that got to see it and experiment it before it went public. Now people from all over the world use the Ojibwe language dictionary.” During testing, the OPD had the difficult task of trying to translate the language that has no word that directly translates to english. This makes the need for language revitalization even more important to the Ojibwe community.

Language revitalization serves not only as a way to preserve history, it’s a way to empower native communities. Cultural identity and language knowledge have improved physical and mental health outcomes among native communities. Nick Deshaw, an American Indian Studies faculty member, talked about his own experience in learning the language, “For me, it meant so much for me to be able to reclaim my language as best I could. Now as a parent, I can pass it on to my child, so that he can learn the language.”

While the University of Minnesota has helped with the revitalization of the Ojibwe language, members of the American Indian Department think the institution can still do more. Deshaw states “Absolutely, I think the University of Minnesota could be doing more. Our program needs a lot more support as far as resources. We really need more space and a lot more visibility. I think this place should be a flagship point of pride for the University, that we are one of the few places in the world where you can get a 4-year bachelor’s degree in the Ojibwe language.”