Children at LCO's Waadookodaading School Sing for Senator Tammy Baldwin

Senator Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin) and Senator Jon Tester (Montana, Chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee) visited the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation yesterday (October 23rd). The LCO reservation is near Hayward, Wisconsin.

The children of the Waadookodaading School sang for the two senators in the Ojibwe language. A video clip is now on Facebook.

By the way, the Lac Courte Oreilles (pronounced "La Coot Ah-Ray") have a good website which includes a page devoted to their school which is, unfortunately, in the midst of something of a funding crisis right now.

In the video clip below, Senator Baldwin talks about her visit to the LCO reservation and school:

Marie Wilcox Tries to Save the Wukchumni Language

The process of saving or reviving a language is a lot of work. And the work is often tedious. Every so often I become aware of a video that is relevant to saving or re-creating Native languages, but few of them ever make it into my blog, they just don't have enough entertainment value.

However, we can thank Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee of the New York Times for making a remarkable 9 1/2-minute video about Marie Wilcox and her family.

Marie Wilcox is a Yokuts Tribe Native from central California.

Marie spoke the Wukchumni language as a child and decades later began writing Wukchumni words on whatever paper she could find. Later she collected the papers and entered them into a computer. She has worked hard enough to give her people a chance to keep Wukchumni alive.

The title of the video is Who Speaks Wukchumni?

 



 
 

Indian Country Today ran an article summarizing the video. Please don't use the article as an excuse not to watch the video.

First Speakers: An Online Video about Preserving the Ojibwe Language

Recently we observed the success of Navajo leaders who gave their traditions a boost by getting the original Star Wars movie dubbed into Dine', their traditional language.

A video that came to my attention this week was actually produced four years ago, but it represents up-to-date information and I'd like to recommend it now to anybody who wants to understand how a living language can be kept from dying and also why a people would take the trouble to save their dying language.

A few weeks ago, I embedded a rather short video in a blogpost about the Ojibwe Language Nest, a preschool in Upper Michigan. In the longer film that you can view below, First Speakers: Restoring the Ojibwe Language, a Minnesota Ojibwe community creates a language immersion school - not a preschool, but an actual accredited Pre-K through 8th grade school aimed at saving their language.

Phonetically, Ojibwe is pronounced "O-jib-way."

A shout-out to enrolled Stockbridge Mohican, Brent Michael Davids, whose flute provides the main title music of this ground-breaking documentary.

 

Preserving the Ojibwe Language in Upper Michigan

A piece of land in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that sticks out into Lake Superior, forming a peninsula of its own, the Keweenaw Peninsula. Next to it, is a bay with the same name. The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (or KIBC) is an Ojibwe tribe or band located along the shores of the Keweenaw Bay near the towns of Baraga and L'Anse.

 
[caption id="attachment_5645" align="aligncenter" width="938"] The yellow arrow points to Baraga, Michigan and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.[/caption]

 

ABC-10, the TV station in the area, recently did a piece about the Ojibwe Language Nest, a preschool that teaches the Ojibwe language, Anishinaabemowin.



 

An excellent collection of links for Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwe was compiled by weshki-ayaad.

Father Baraga, also known as "the snowshoe priest," is the author of one of probably the most famous Ojibwe/English dictionaries. It was completed in 1853 and can be accessed here thanks to the Wisconsin State Historical Society.