S2E7: Bagwajinini - Alex Kmett

Bagwajinini-Alex Kmett is a citizen of the Red Lake Nation (Eagle clan) and a descendant of the Pillager Band at Leech Lake, by way of Ponemah and Cass Lake, respectively. He is a co-founder of the Endazhi-Nitaawiging Charter School at Red Lake, where he currently serves as a Curriculum Designer, and a co-founder of Ojibwemotaadidaa's Gookonaanig Endaawaad Language Nest at Fond du Lac. He holds a Master of Arts in Indigenous Education from Arizona State University, and has taught Ojibwe language at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College and University of Minnesota Morris, in addition to Ojibwemotaadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminaang (OOG). As a second language speaker/learner, he and his partner raise their two children to be trilingual Ojibwe/Spanish/English speakers utilizing a unique blend of ML@H and OPOL parenting methods. In addition to his work in language and education, he is an artist, experimental musician, food producer, and advocate for land back.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I mean there's there's tons of teachings that we can still accumulate within our lives as non-speakers. And there's a ton that people do have that I'm extremely grateful for. So I don't want to talk down on anybody's knowledge by any means. Um but it's just it's it's a completely different system of organizing knowledge within our brains. You know, if we're talking about it like at a cognitive level, it's like it's like braiding it together. If you're talking about it in the as like a beating analogy, it's like, you know, double stitching or whatever, you know. Everything's just stronger. There's all those connections are just woven together there at that point.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

So, you know, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_08 1:11

This is a grassroots podcast intended for those raising or helping to raise children in an indigenous language.

SPEAKER_07 1:19

A special shout out to the Indigenous Screen Office for making season two of En-weighing possible. Get Jimmy Gwenge.

SPEAKER_09 1:30

We're back again for another episode of your favorite podcasters. We have a really uh awesome friend and guest, uh Gujin or Alex Commander. Something that I know any any other person is doing story.

SPEAKER_04 5:54

So if anyone has any suggestions for a new black SCD, black on black on black. Let me know. Glorilla is my girl right now, so I wanted to make her glow. Anywho, moving on. It's just so nice, it's nice to catch up on here for listeners and update that before before their minds explode full of knowledge of all these fantastic people that are talking about. I still want people to get to know us or hear from us, but at the same time, it's like that's all gonna be shadowed I can hear the wealth of knowledge at least friends and role models and learners knowledge carriers that we're gonna take myself. I think I've tried every single interview for the last like I think every single one. I try really hard not to because I could just ball in front of them, but I'm doing my very best to like my friend Especially when they talk about like the world. I know he'll be on here shortly, so yeah. We'll introduce our guest here. Um let's get into it. Sorry, I missed like all of that because my earphones keep messing up, but um I remember like the first like daycare at a kindergarten switch, it was just like a whole like one year or two of like just sickness. And then we've been kind of out of the woods ever since, like yeah, here and there, but we've been pretty good after that.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

So nice. I'm I'm hoping just as soon as uh everything starts warming up, it's gonna be a lot a lot nicer over here. All these cooped up and I I heard it was at the preschool where my daughter's going to school, they had a whole week where every day at least one student would throw up. Probably for about two weeks or so. So I was just like, oh, it's gonna hit us eventually, I know. And then sure enough, just like a week or two ago, hit everybody but me. I was probably just asymptomatic because I was cleaning up after everybody, and there's no way that I couldn't have picked it up. Just grateful it didn't hit hit me with symptoms.

SPEAKER_04 9:30

Yeah, no kidding. That's the worst too. Like that's the worst. I think that went through here in like December, where it was like every play place that we went to, there was like, oh, you guys need a clean up.

SPEAKER_03 9:43

There's someone else throughout.

SPEAKER_04 9:46

So we haven't been to crowded spaces for a bit.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

So much, so much paranoia with the I don't want to say after the pandemic because COVID's still around, you know. But it's when everybody starts moving back into being in public spaces again. Like I just had so much trauma from all that, like watching so many of our elders pass and everything. I was just like, like, how do I even keep it get back to all this, you know?

SPEAKER_04 10:15

Yeah. Yeah. I I have been like, we're not getting sick, we're not going anywhere anymore.

SPEAKER_05 10:26

And more Monty and Zama, just like going through death, like three weeks of different something. I think you've been through like two different viruses at least by now.

SPEAKER_09 10:36

Yeah, the past couple weeks.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Yeah, my my daughter's ESL teacher too was kind of concerned at conferences about like uh just how much school she's missed this year and everything. Just like we'll end up falling behind and all that. But it's I was like, hmm, it's fine, she's doing good. Like English isn't the biggest concern for us with her ESL and everything. And I mean, we'll get into this in the interview and everything, but like she she only just learned English like when she went to school. And aside from that, like um, she already speaks Ojibwe, so once you get there for Ojibwe immersion, like she's just like, you know, kindergarten they facilitate a lot of it in English for the first like half year or so. So she's just like, why do I gotta go? Just like I feel you. It was the same way growing up.

SPEAKER_05 11:37

It's like young elder, just like annoyed that just knows it.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Yeah, she tells me too, she's like, I already know how to talk. Why do I gotta go to learn how to talk?

SPEAKER_04 11:51

And that's goals right there.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Well, it's a little bit more than that, but you'll get to it eventually, I hope.

SPEAKER_04 11:59

Yeah. And having those multiple languages is like like they're already like they already have like three times circle the the pathways to different sorts of learning and being and stuff, right? So I'm like, it's okay. It's okay if they're they can't go for because we're doing something cultural or we're doing something important. I'm like, she'll be fine.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

We we we sent her to the early education language and asked for the day. So we're like, go with them then community, right?

SPEAKER_05 12:35

Uh-huh. Anish and uh and superbonekizat uh giga shwasu babonakese.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

Umish anishway.

SPEAKER_04 13:09

Um gave quiz.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Um goes a stush meet me away, ne so booponic is it.

SPEAKER_04 13:23

Oh uh eh.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 13:31

Oh wait. Um well like segments really nicely. Like, do you want to introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_09 13:50

Oh, no.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Also, and we're gonna talk but watching the cars magazine to them, you would do bashing when you bow and dinner, you would miss quad meansaka ngish corner can't gunning in day no gum. Uh you umji wemo and what is one Asian Akadik, Miko uh Ukunanagain Dawa di with the Ojibwe mo ta mewan nggi pakakunagame, oskke gekinumading you would the squagami withining in touchinatawaging gaji winjigatik uh mi main dana kia ngom jujichigean, nojke goje nabadak magikinomading, we waning goje u kakuadi uhekinomage jkwite uhanobajiwa and we witwanashik uhigwa uhnutumage. Um hello my relatives. My name is Alex Kamat. I come from the Eagle clan at Red Lake. Uh, my family comes from the community of Panima or Obashing in the Ojibwe language. But these days I live at uh Pondulac Reservation. Uh my partner and I moved here in I don't know what year, but about nine years ago or so. And at the time I was moving up to work with the Ojibwe Motor Magadikimenong program where I met each of you. Um worked there for about eight years or so. And although I still live here, I don't work there anymore. Um we had helped to open a uh early childhood immersion nest called Goku Nanaga in Dawad through the Ojiway Motida program. So my family is part of the we're one of the founding families of that, and my son still attends. And since then, I've my my current employment that's at the Indagina Tauging Charter School. So I'm one of the co-founders of that. And then I had stepped off of our uh founding board of directors so that I could take a position doing curriculum development so that we could support our teachers, uh, who were just really needing some more resources within the classroom. And just I'm sure we all know the difficulties that emerging classrooms face and short staffing and not having enough curriculum. So just doing what we can to build all of that and trying to build something, something great within our community. Um, so yeah, I've been I've been raising my each of my children in Ojibwe language. Umik Bamad is Wad. Um well, even since since my my firstborn was still in the womb, was only speaking Ojibwe to her. And to this day, um I haven't said more than just a couple words in English to them, mostly just to help describe what some of these English terms mean. Um just different situations like that, I suppose. And and then also their their mother is from Mexico, uh, my partner Erica. And she raises them in Spanish language also. So we we kind of use a different um, it's kind of like a modified one parent, one language type of approach slash minority language at home. We we still use English amongst ourselves, like between me and Erica as like a parent or facilitator language, but not directly with the kids. So our our kids are not English speakers until um just this fall, sending my daughter to kindergarten within about four months, she learned English. So when you hear about it being that slippery slope with immersion, when you start introducing English, you know, I I totally believe that. But it's um yeah, she just started it's just the irony of you. You send you to immersion school and they come back talking English. But it's it's a blessing, and you know, I I wouldn't change it for change it for anything. Uh so yeah, that's that's my introduction. Great, great to be here and to to see you all again and kind of a trip to hear you guys' voices in English. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_09 18:47

I was just gonna say that. So we met at the time at our to call it oog. And I think me and you met in 2015. And the majority. I think. What was it?

SPEAKER_00 19:03

I I think so. But I I went through the first time in 2015 as a student, and that's um Miss Guanacod was a student there at the time. Miss Guanaquid in the um Iguanabique. I had already met Miss Guanacod when he was on tour with his band, uh B Pigwai. I went and saw them down in Minneapolis and was chatting them up in Ojibwe down there about a year prior. But then we saw each other at Move, and we're like, hey, what's up? You know, well, you know.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

That's actually so cool.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Yeah, and and then it was the next year get to meet you as well. And by then I was on staff and everything.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

So oh yeah.

SPEAKER_09 19:42

Yeah, so the majority of our time that we've known each other has been all in Ojibwe. So and other people I've met that way too, and it's really funny to hear hear people speak English.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, I think I think the only times I've heard you talk English is maybe when we did like I can't remember if we did any English orientation with Ojibwe Motaida. Like maybe we did a little bit at that time. Uh otherwise just listening to his podcast.

SPEAKER_03 20:15

I mean, listen, okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

And when I put into it, I had the same thought. I was like, hey, I recognize the voices, but just like, you know, hearing it in English is totally different.

SPEAKER_04 20:25

Yeah. I was like, I was surprised too when I heard you say hello and everything. I was like, it's just such a trip, right?

SPEAKER_03 20:32

So you're like, oh my god, that's or when you hear their first names too, because they're English given names, like you're not uh that, like, you know, Monty.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Like I've heard some people say too, it's almost like a different um, it's almost like you take on a different personality when you're forced to well, you know, maybe force isn't the right word, but you know, English is so violent. When you're when you're in these positions of, you know, only using your language then, you know, and finding ways to communicate. It's like you you kind of take on a different uh different demeanor. Of course, too, there's the humility too, and not wanting to interrupt elders and all that.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

So or just someone's like learning journey, like you're like, oh, you're you'll figure it out in a second here.

SPEAKER_04 21:29

Like I don't want to interrupt. Yeah. Sorry, we kind of already like spoke about this, but we can get into maybe I don't know if you want to get into details, but yeah, so we we met at Oog, and it's so funny because like there's two things that I that really stand out as um when we played Capture the Flag and I was trying to catch you.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

I felt so bad about that for years.

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Oh my god, no, it was like it's just so funny because I was just like, I'm gonna get him.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Turned your ankle. Well, we should probably explain that story for your listeners then.

SPEAKER_05 22:10

Alone Global made me write the story in the shop. I went in his grammar classes, so I could just teach you the whole story.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

Oh, so yeah, we were, it was like the last day, and and we there was always like extracurricular or like activities in the evenings that you can attend if you want to. And I was generally like burnt out by that time. So I was taking the time to rest in the evenings, but I felt such a FOMO because I wanted to be there, but I was just like tapped out at that point. So on the last night, I was like, okay, fine. Like I really want to be a part of this, I really want to play with everyone. I like this is stuff I didn't want to miss. And I'm like, it's the last night, you have nothing to lose.

SPEAKER_03 22:50

So I gave it my all, and of course I broke my ankle trying to capture you in the woods. I captured the flag.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

It's just such an Emily here too. I was like, all right, I bet I can escape. I'm gonna try to hurl over these bushes, and then the next thing I hear, ow, behind me. Turn around. I'm like, oh no. Like so embarrassing. And of course, my mind too. It's like, this is kind of an emergency situation. Do I switch to English? Do I stay in Ojibwe? Is your mind gonna be panicking? Am I gonna be understood? Am I overthinking this? I don't know if it happened that same summer or if it was the next summer or what, you know, because I I was there for years, but that's we had another instance of actually an elder breaking her wrist also when we were we were playing duck duck gray duck. And well, that was the year before I went. I remember hearing about that. Oh, must have been when I was a student then. Yeah, so we were we were playing duck duck gray duck, a bunch of adults playing duck duck gray duck.

SPEAKER_05 24:01

Is that like duck duck goose?

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Oh yeah, sorry, Minnesota dialect of English. So we're uh yeah, we we were playing that out in the parking lot, you know, that's all paved rather than in the you know, in the grass or anything. And one of the elders tripped and broke her wrist and then had to go to the hospital in the United States, which is well, nobody likes to go there. But yeah, so so after those two years, you know, it's like we had to re rethink some things. You know there was another time I think we were at the Cloquet Forestry Center uh with my before he passed the Nickel button. And um we were playing that game that was uh Baji Jue button, like where you throw the ball like over the building and you got like two teams. It's I don't know, kind of like a dodgeball type of thing, but like with uh you throw the ball over a building and try to sneak around. But so anyway, he tried to boot this ball and with his big old cowboy boots, and sure enough, this ball go goes like right through the screen of one of the cabins of the forest center and like breaks a window. Yeah, we're like, all right, we gotta we gotta rethink some of this.

SPEAKER_05 25:27

We're just having too much fun.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:31

What was I gonna say about that too? Um, yeah, because that was the last night. So I'm like, I'm not going to a hospital.

SPEAKER_05 25:37

So I was just like fevered up and just like almost hallucinating in pain, but I'm like, I'm not going to a US hospital.

SPEAKER_03 25:45

And we drove back 13 hours and wanted to just like help me together.

SPEAKER_05 25:50

And then we went to a hospital here because I was like, I'm not, I'm not finding it when I have a broken bone or something in the States. So that was too that was too good.

SPEAKER_03 25:58

It made it, it made it such a good story now.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

So yeah, worth it at least.

SPEAKER_04 26:03

Yeah, yeah. I mean it was embarrassing. Like because I think I was I went to English. You were trying to talk to me in the language, and I was like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 26:14

Logi knows that well too, because like I get like that when I'm like real cranky or real in pain or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

We were all I mean by then the end of the three weeks, I think we're fairly uh acclimated to one another's dialects, but it's still pretty new to one another, too. I had to do that. Oh well, yeah, and just when you're in pain, you're like not accessing that part of your brain, right?

SPEAKER_04 26:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:37

Um, and then the other other thing I I remember is um we were gonna make those crafts with um the the tuna can tins.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Oh the the drums got mine up on the wall right here.

SPEAKER_04 26:51

Yeah, giggle with a little drum. Yeah. And but I didn't know we were doing that. So I just saw you um, we were getting ready for the weekend, you're headed to a powwow, and you were unloading like 10 tins of tuna.

SPEAKER_03 27:06

Making sandwiches. I was like, oh, he likes some giggle. Like Manapook's walk.

SPEAKER_05 27:13

Like I was like, holy. And then when we came back and did the craft, I was like, oh, it makes sense. He was like being so generous.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

I had uh I spent so much time washing tuna cans to get those smell the smell out too that weekend. Uh a micle bunny sent me, he's like, go go up there and buy about 15 cans of tuna. I was like, for what? Like, we're gonna make drums. So so then um I was asking too, like, so so what do we do with all this tuna? A tuna salad neach. I was like, all right.

SPEAKER_03 28:03

Like in the heat, because I think you're added to a powwow.

SPEAKER_05 28:07

Um yeah, and I was like, man, tuna sandwiches all weekend in the heat, man. Poor guy. I was like, that's commitment though. So it was like, I was like, I admired that. I was like, oh, that's commitment, especially when I saw the crafts. I was like, okay, it's all coming together.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

They they wouldn't pay us until the end of the end of the summer cam, you know. So gotta get by.

SPEAKER_05 28:38

So yeah, that's how like that's like that's a really good. I don't know if if Monty, you have anything else you want to add before we ask?

SPEAKER_09 28:46

No, no, I just just good listening. Listening to the stories, but excuse me. I guess we could get into uh your language journey, how you started and all that.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

Sure. So yeah, that's that's pretty winding. I suppose uh to start with all that, I have to start before I was even born. So um, you know, as I mentioned in my introduction, uh my family comes from Panima originally over at Red Lake Reservation. And um, at least in the United States, uh Panima had retained some of the highest fluency levels in the well in the United States. Um and then I think was it there was that informal language survey that uh Anton Troyer did in like 2009 or so that was still finding that at Red Lake Reservation they had more than twice the amount of speakers at Red Lake Reservation, mostly in Panima, than they had in the entire rest of the United States combined. So our community did a pretty good job of holding on. To it, but that said, like you know, 15 years or so has passed since then, and a lot of that's also kind of faded as well. But there's there's still quite a bit of language up that way. Um, but anyway, so that's where my grandmother was born and came from originally. And Ojibwe was her first language until she was probably eight years old or so. Um then she went to the she didn't go to boarding school, but she went to the public school on the reservation there. And um it wasn't until I was working on my master's, you know, because I I didn't really hear too much from her about her school age days and everything. But when I was working on my master's, which I got in um Indigenous education through Arizona State University, I was reading this article by Brenda Childs, who had interviewed Eugene Stilday, who's my grandmother's first cousin and one of the speakers on Ojibwe People's Dictionary. And he was talking about his experiences going to school over there at the public school, um, probably just a couple of years before her, and just the experiences that they had with the teachers over there, and some of it kind of parallels some of the same experiences people had with boarding schools as well, uh, with regard to language, you know. So not getting into all of that too deeply, but um, you know, my grandmother, she had stopped speaking Ojibwe, still understands it pretty well, but she doesn't really speak it anymore. But sometimes she'll ask me, like, you know, you know, how do you say this? Or if we just start talking about different topics and I mentioned something, she's like, Oh yeah, yeah. And she she totally remembers and can chime in with other other things. So that's that's really a blessing to still be able to hold on to that. Um, but you know, she since she didn't really hold on to it, she didn't teach her children. Um, she told me that, you know, she wishes she would have, you know, but it's it's just consequences of history and everything. So my dad didn't really learn it, except for like, you know, a handful of things like place names and general things, you know, things that everybody knows. So I remember as being a little kid and driving around uh Leech Lake Reservation, uh, where he's enrolled at, and um just asking about some of these, like I would see sign for um Lake Winnipegoshish, and I would ask, like, what does that mean? You know, you see this sign that's like, you know, got a word on it that's like 20 letters long. So I'm like, hey, what's that mean? And then um that's I think that's what really just piqued this interest in me. And I ran into, you know, the end of his language knowledge pretty fairly quickly as a kid. And and then through our um Indian education programs through elementary, middle, high school, you know, they just had very, very, very basic language, uju, me goch, and numbers, colors, animals, things like that. Um, but anyway, just I felt like I had at least the enough exposure to it from childhood and then throughout youth that I recognized it. I know how it sounds. It's just I didn't have the the structure for it for really knowing how to navigate grammar. And back in those days, you know, like early 2000s and earlier, there were there wasn't the same types of resources that we have available now. And even the way that people teach it now is different, you know, going into the actual like morphosyntactic structure and like morphemes, word parts, all of that, like that wasn't really something I was even seeing covered in in my early education when I was taking OG language classes more formally. Seemed like a lot of teachers don't even want to touch BTAs, you know, they're just terrified. Like, where do where do I even begin, you know? So so anyway, I I found some really great uh well, what was it? I I went to college at uh Menuz. They changed the name recently. I think it's called Minneapolis College now, but before it was like Minneapolis Community and Technical College, MCTC. And I took um introduction to Ojibwe Language there with uh Rick Greshik. He had developed um, I had I think I heard McGizzy talk about some of the stuff that he put together on your guide. Um but he didn't mention the books that I used that I was assigned for. And you know, he was talking about how you know they're like pretty cheaply made stuff. The stuff I had was even cheaper, it wasn't even spiral bound. It was just a single piece of tape board with maybe about 20, 20 pages, eight and a half by 11, stapled in the middle and folded, you know. So you know, super cheap, and then comes with these CDs and everything too. So the one I had was um Ojibwe word lists, which I thought actually provided a very well-organized introduction to Ojibwe grammar. Um, and then that was paired with like Ojibwe conversations or something like that. And it was like 50 brief, like um like I think like probably about four sentence total conversations um between speakers. And that was done between Rick Greshik and Margaret Sayers, who came from Red Lake Reservation. So like I I spent a lot of time just listening to those CVs and like repeating, trying to get like the pronunciation just right and the flow just right, um, and then just looking through that tiny, tiny little introductory grammar manual. But honestly, some of the other grammatical resources I've come across over the years haven't been, they they didn't quite have the same uh organization to them. And I felt like they were a bit harder to navigate. So yeah, that I felt like that provided a pretty good basis anyway. I should preface before I even took those classes, before I even enrolled in college, actually, when I was about 18. One of the first things I did, uh, because I I was raised um, you know, my after my parents split, I had to go with my mom and I was raised in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis area. So anyway, once I turned about 18 or so, one of the first things I did is I took a car and I drove it up to Cass Lake, went to the what do you call the Memorial Day Powell up there and was just visiting around with my family, like I like my dad would take me to do when I was a kid. So when I went up there, um I don't even know how I had found it on my own without anybody directing me there. But I I found my way off of all these curvy roads. And, you know, roads have been paved since then. Like they they're not, they don't look the same as when I was a kid. But somehow I ended up at the at the graveyard where my where my relatives are all at, you know, and they got those spear houses there and everything, uh Buck Lake Cemetery out in Leech Lake Reservation. So I went out there and I brought food and I brought tobacco. And I went and just visited with my relatives and fed them and asked for help because I already knew at that point that uh languages was something very important to me. But I didn't have teachers in my life. I didn't know quite where to start. Um, just knew that I wanted to start it with tobacco. So I went and I brought it to my relatives because they were all OG Boy speakers before they passed away. So that's one of the biggest things that I attribute to my success in language learning, is just that I started off with uh tobacco and directly asking the spirits before I was even asking people. And to this day, there's been a lot of things too that have just kind of clicked and I didn't really know why regarding my own education or or things that I never really got educated in or directly directly taught. I don't know, things just click in place. So make an in dogwak, like it just must have just been meant to be. Um so yeah, I I took the I only took that one semester of class, of class, not even classes, one semester of class with Rick Greshik. And um, at that point I had run out of funds and I wasn't able to keep going to college for several years. So at that point, I was just um trying to go to language tables and I was studying over resources like the Oshkape was a native journal and a lot of those recordings. Um eventually, several years later, probably before four years later, I had remembered that the University of Minnesota Morris has an Indian tuition waiver because um they have this history that they used to be a boarding school back in the day. And when I was graduating high school, I wasn't interested at all in attending there. I I didn't even think I was gonna go to college or anything at that point, you know. But when I looked at like their flyers, I just it it seemed so dull. I was like, there's there's nothing there for me, you know. But you know, five years pass and not being able to afford to put yourself through school, like I was ready for a change. So I I went there. Um, January 2010, I transferred in, and one of the first things I did was I founded a Ojibwe language table trying to bring together people that knew the language so we could just pull our knowledge together. They they didn't have anybody teaching it there at the time. And then one day when I was running language table, I got uh one of the directors of the multi-ethnic student program came in. He's like, hey, we got this guy here, he's interviewing to teach Ojibwe language. Like, really? When and all? Like, who's that? Oh, Gabe DeRoje. Oh, well, they didn't talk English to me, he was a Navajo guy. Or they didn't talk Ojibwe to me, he was a Navajo guy. You know, he's like, Oh, do you know him? And uh I didn't know him personally at that point, but uh he was lead singer for uh the Northern Wind drum and also for uh back in the day on Whitefish Bay singers. So both of those drums were pretty when I was growing up, pretty common to have them out at Cast Lake Powell's and Red Lake Powell's and everything. So they they were actually among my favorite singers, my favorite songs. Like I already like knew a lot of his songs and everything, so I was just you know pumped to have him come and teach us language because you know a lot of their songs are in language too. So he ended up teaching there fall 2010. So I I took uh and he was brand new teacher, but he's a first speaker, you know. So it's um some of like like I said, about some of these curricular materials for teaching grammar, some of them aren't organized so well. I felt like some of the materials over there like weren't organized that well, but I at least had that background already. So for me, it was mostly about connecting in with a first speaker. So literally every day after after class, we would go with him and we would have our lunch together, have coffee, have it for like another hour, hour and a half, because I didn't have classes at that time. And I suppose for him, you know, he's on the clock, you know. So we get to just hang out with students and talk Ojibwe, you know, that's the dream, right? So um, so yeah, by the second year of classes with him, I think uh I think was it fourth semester, so like uh intermediate Ojibwe level two or something like that. Um I was one of three students in the class. And a lot of days I was the only student that would show up. So on those days, in addition to our usual going and get lunch and coffee, like we would uh sometimes we would just go for a cruise around town and just point out the things we say and just talk about it. So I was getting my getting my immersion in, you know, early. But it was like a slightly different dialect than what they teach usually around Minnesota. Like a lot of a lot of what gets taught is Malach so give way. It seems like uh John Nichols that worked with our dictionary and say like a Wanegabo, for instance, a lot a lot of their what do you call informants that they were using, hey, we're all um a lot of Malach speakers. So there's definitely like a lot of that, like really southern Minnesota, well central Minnesota, uh influence on a lot of what gets taught as Minnesota Ojibwe these days, like Red Lake Ojibwe or Panima Ojibwe. There's some some materials, some older materials that are developed with that, but most of it, it's uh you have to seek that out. So then um Gabe, when I was learning from him, his dialect was closer to what I know at Red Lake. But it was also like, like when I asked him, you know, like what do you call that? Is that like say like a Kanora dialect or a white whitefish bay dialect? Like he he calls it Soto. So I was just like, okay, okay, you know, and like I noticed there's some differences, like when I talk to people I know that went to Ojibwe Motaida and they listen to him speak, I ask, like, you know, do you notice differences and stuff? And like, yeah, they're picking up on it, but generally understand it, but there's some differences for sure. Um, but anyway, so I I took those classes with him, graduated, and then um I didn't go to Ojibwe Motaida the first year or two that it was operating. Um I didn't get my application together in for like another two years or so. You know, everybody's intimidated by that. So I I get it. I that's those eight years I was working there, I was always trying to uh negate that by just hyping people up, you know, and trying to tell them, like, no, you're ready, you're ready. You just gotta jump into it, dive in, you know. But then um, so anyway, I went to Ojiway Motaida 2014. And by then, like, because I didn't have people to talk to for a while, I was feeling a little bit rusty, and people are talking different dialects and everything, too. So um I felt like I had a slow start over there. And also, you know, just being in this huge immersive environment with like several people talking, you know, it's it's overwhelming. People new to immersion, you know, you get those headaches and everything, especially on the second week or so. Third week, it looks like I just I hit my stride. All of a sudden, I was just like, boom, I could just I could speak. And I remember um the director at the time too when when calling me up to ask if I was interested to come and work, I had commented that was just really uh impressed with the progress that I had made. And I I felt like it was just shaking off the rust, you know, like it was already there. It was just a matter of like putting it into practice. And you know, it's like driving a car in the winter, you gotta get the get the oil warmed up a bit, you know. So that that's kind of what it felt like for me a bit. Um that said, I mean, there was still a lot of things that I still didn't know about language structure and all that. So a lot of the grammatical instruction from Owanagabo was very helpful, as was um when I started working on curriculum development for them. I I think that was probably one of the biggest things because um, geez, that first year I was working there, we had two other people hired as language specialists, and they had both quit after a couple months. So it was basically just me and the director. And we were running everything for the for the winter program just by ourselves. And we had like, you know, all this money set aside to be doing recording with elders and everything, too. So sometimes I was putting in up to 75-hour weeks doing um recording and transcription and uh translation with um a bunch of elders, you know, um Nancy Jones, uh the late Leon Wakanabo, Jerry Howard, Amico Bun, you know, I was working with a lot of them for especially in that year, putting in a lot of hours that year, but in the coming years after that, with a lot of um just like these late grade Ojibwe language speakers. And I think just like sitting there with them with their voices and headphones, you know, trying to figure out like, am I hearing a WA or am I hearing an O, you know, and listening to the same word over and over for an hour and kind of driving myself crazy with it. Um that was that was tremendous, I think, for like really tightening up my pronunciation and um just like really knowing how the language flows, listening to these longer passages and just diving into it. Um yeah, that that was that was huge for my own language development. And then and then, of course, also raising my kids now too, like basically using it all day, every day. But that there's also a challenge there too, because um, I mean, we we hit the pandemic during that and it was um it really kind of slowed things down in a way because we weren't able to work directly in person with elders anymore and had to change up our workflow to working on Zoom, which I felt kind of awkward, you know. Sometimes you run into connection issues like we just did, you know. But generally it was um that's right. The so the difficult with raising difficulty with raising kids with the pandemic. On one hand, it was like very much a blessing because it was very insular and you're able to protect against English in that way and just really, really focus in on Ojibwe language because there's not all these outside influences during the pandemic. But then on the other hand, um there's far less opportunities for modeling conversational language. If it's just me doing it one way to my kids all the time, you know, of course you run into like some cognitive burnout there, you know, asking and answering your own questions, you know. Um, but just not having other people to to respond back to you all the time. Um, and then also just the fact that you're speaking to infants and toddlers, you know, you you kind of I mean, I I feel like I didn't um I didn't relent with VTAs on my children whatsoever. I gave it to them full strength. But um on the other hand, it's like, you know, just because you're talking about just topics that are relevant to children all the time and not having adult conversations, you know, there's there's a bit of like atrophy that happens there too. It comes back pretty quick with practice, but it's it's still frustrating in the moment, you know. And I I guess that happens even seasonally when you're doing things that it's like, okay, I haven't talked about gardening, you know, we we're only gardening what three, four months a year anyway, in in this northern climate. But uh okay, we haven't talked about gardening in eight months. It's time to jump back into that. How do I say dig a hole again? You know, but yeah, that that's been a huge thing too for us as a family. It's just uh we produce a lot of food, do a lot of gardening. So we try to raise our kids out in the garden and do it all in the language. I feel like the the connections that are being made there, like um, you know, and in our language too, it's uh I feel like there's so many aspects of relationality and reciprocity that are reflected within our language, just that are tied to our own worldviews and the way that we interact with everything. Um just to be able to model those forms of respect, both linguistically and to our actions with within the garden, I think is tremendous for um the types of things that we're trying to pass on to our children. Like, you know, just recognizing that plants are lives too, or like bugs are lives too, you know. Like so many people, I think when they're out there gardening, you know, they view like say anything like a weed or a bug is just like a pest, you know, that needs to be eradicated, you know. And it's when I'm out there and I, you know, I do my talk in the spring before I even break the soil, you know, I'm I'm asking for forgiveness from the bugs because that's their home, you know. Like they didn't invite me in, you know, so it's like you think about that in the context of colonialism, and it's almost like an inner species form, you know. So it's like I just I know that people I've had people too that are fluent speakers like, well, you gotta eat too in each. It's like, oh yeah. But it's I I think it's uh, you know, those are monedon sec. They're little spirits, you know. We we've got to be respectful to them too. So I try to tell them, you know, it's like, let's take it easy on one another. There's gonna be plenty here. Take it easy on my food. You can have some, you know, but just make sure we we gotta eat too. And since I've kind of stopped worrying about some of that stuff too, and just kind of go about it, like like we we had we've had great harvests. Like my my first year out at the tribal farm here too. I had like over 3,000 pounds of school pounds of food past my scale.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:26

So like we we end up giving away a lot of it because we can't even handle it all, and it comes back to us in different ways, like walleye and moose and stuff like that. Like, I I'm not a fond walker, so I don't have the the right to hunt moose, but they do. And you know, if we're supplying them with a bunch of vegetables too, it's like we're all eating good. So it's really just about you know, these community connections and forms of interrelationality and reciprocity and just ways that that we're trying to model all that, both in our in our language and in our life life ways. That's what we're trying to do for our kids. I think my connection's well enough for video again.

SPEAKER_04 52:14

Oh, good, yeah. Um, I'm always left speechless. I said that on the last one. I'm always like so much like in that that I'm like, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 52:23

When you were um when you started learning, did you know you wanted to have kids and speak to them and wanted them to be a language of voice speakers?

SPEAKER_00 52:35

Maybe kind of kind of complicated there. Like when I was growing up, like I don't know, I I was pretty depressed growing up in the city, you know, like disconnected from family, disconnected from even a lot of my friends. Like um like uh my neighborhood, we had a lot of um Hmong people in the community, which um I don't know if you guys have Hmong people up around your area. You guys are around Toronto, right? More or less. Oh yeah, probably probably not over there then. Um I think in the US anyway, Minneapolis and Los Angeles have the biggest Hmong populations. They're they're like uh they're like a kind of like an Asian tribal group from out in the mountains. They don't have their own country. Um in the border areas of like China, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, kind of kind of that region is where they're from. But we had a lot of them in my community where I where I was growing up in the Twin Cities. And um just the way that their family structures were and the what even their diets a little bit, I don't know, not so much, but just the fact that they they were making a lot of fish and hanging out with their grandma, you know, it's it reminded me of my my own family. So I was hanging out with them a lot when I was a kid, but then um by the time I got to like sixth grade and about to go to middle school, I got sent to a different school altogether. And it was like mostly white students around there, and like it's just disconnected from them again, even further. So it's like, I don't know. When I was growing up, I felt like uh I was having difficulty trying to figure out how to even express myself, you know, whether that's in artistic forms or or in language, whether that's English or or what. Um the middle school I went to, um well, middle school and early high school. Between the two of them, I had four years of Spanish language. So I guess I was kind of hardwired for language learning from from you. But I I remember thinking, um, probably probably in high school or so, I was like, I I I don't think I even really want to have kids. I think I just want to move off to the woods and just kind of be a hermit in the woods. Maybe I'll go to Panema and learn Ojibwe language there, go off in the bush up in Canada, and that's probably just how I'm gonna live my life. That's that was my thoughts at you know, 16 through 19, probably. Like even my early days in college, you know, I didn't really have a desire to participate in you know, white American settler society.

SPEAKER_04 55:12

Did you have your name at that point?

SPEAKER_00 55:14

No, I I got it uh when I came up to Ojibemota when I was working with uh Mikel Goblup and passed him tobacco.

SPEAKER_04 55:25

I just because I'm you're like, oh, I want to go be a Herman up in the woods and like oh but wedge in it.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

But you know, and I I suppose too, like if I had had that support of you know being able to get my name and have that community connection in that way, you know, like the in education programs when I was in school, like at least the district I was in, like there was only a small handful, so small handful of families, and we were spread out between different grades. So we weren't in classes with each other. We didn't really build up social connections like we could have or should have, you know, didn't have the the ability to even like look out for each other on the classroom, you know, because we're in different grades, you know. Um, but that said, if you know, it might have been a different story if I had had that, had more community like I wanted as a kid, you know. Um but uh anyway, so I I didn't really think I was gonna even have kids or anything. I but I I knew language was something I was at least interested in. Um but when I once I was getting started and everything too, I I think that's around the time that the I don't know if you all ever saw the first speakers documentary. It's uh it was through PBS. What is that? I don't remember what PBS stands for. But uh public broadcasting service, is that it? Yeah, PBS. That's where they would, you know, where they used to show Sesame Street, you know, before that got bought by HBO. What a crime. Um so what let's see, what was I saying? Um distracting myself.

SPEAKER_04 57:15

Um the first speaker's videos.

SPEAKER_00 57:18

Oh yeah, so I saw that documentary and um it focused on um mostly on the well, I mean it it they talked to like Anton Troyer and I I think maybe even Keller over at the Wadukoding school. Yeah, I guess I just gestured to the east. Um and um but in particular the Niigani school up at uh Leech Lake. I wasn't sure if you guys were frozen or not. Um and uh so that school was um at the time being run by uh Leslie Harper and Nabake Liberty, Adrian, and um I saw that they were raising their kid there also and just talking all Ojibwe to him. And I I saw that it, you know, it it created an impact on me for sure. Um, so at some point, like I I knew once I was on that path for language that if I had kids that I would want to raise them with Ojibwe language, I didn't think I would ever get to a level of fluency where I would be able to do it only in Ojibwe. You know, that was that's a much more recent development. But yeah, I was it it it was a thought, you know, that that was that was probably the main reason for learning language. It was to be able to pass it on, whether it's to my kids or just to keep it going within the community in general. But upon knowing I was gonna have kids, like it wasn't even a question in my mind. It was like, yeah, that's how that's how it's happening. So but that said, like, ooh, like I never thought I'd be doing it trilingually with in a household with um Ojibwe and Spanish. And that creates so much more of uh some logistical challenges there. And I mean, I I've got those four years of Spanish that I had taken growing up to. Like I've got comprehension, but you know, when it comes to speaking it, like I can order food and I can sound really fluent doing it. But that said, like if somebody tries to have a conversation with me, I'm like, okay, you know, I don't know.

SPEAKER_09 59:26

Or are you the monolingual Jebuis speaker to your kids and your partners, the like Spanish speaker to them?

SPEAKER_00 59:35

Generally, yes, but she we also recognize that Spanish is a world language and there's so much more resources available for it. Like if our kids want to watch, you know, Netflix or Disney or anything, they've got it all in Spanish. Like they can get anything in Spanish, you know, and it's it's that much easier. Um, it's a it's such a coordinated effort to do it all. In Ojibwe. So my partner, since we since we started dating, she started coming to Ojibwe Language Table with me. And she's like, Well, I want to learn my partner's language. And if we ever have kids, I want to be able to speak their language too. And also to understand what our kids are saying. And that's a big thing for me, too, being able to understand Spanish. So at least having some comprehension, that's big. So at some point when I was moving away from working with Ojibwe Moltaida for like economic reasons, I had to take completely different work and pivot. And I was working in uh organic agriculture for a while. Was it uh I was uh farmer education manager for an organization that puts on like the largest organic farming conference in the United States. Um so I so I did that for like about a year and a half. And during that time, um my my partner, Erica, she she took, took my place in at the language nest, uh, bringing our kids over there because I figured she also needs to have all that background in Ojibwe to be able to understand it. And like she she's even come to Ojibwe Motaida as a student. Like I think it was just a year before we had our kids. Um they had started uh the cohort, uh, what did they call it? Um the language of babies and parenting cohort. That's it. Coincidentally, two or three of us on staff just happened to make babies around that time. So it must have just got willed into existence, I guess, at that time. Like, oh, you want to talk about babies, huh? So, you know, I at that point, you know, then then all of a sudden we that's when we had to work on a lot of this language that was much less documented around like labor, around pregnancy, around even the way you talk about very, very young children or talk about pregnancy. Like, how you ask somebody how far along are you? You know, like that's uh, or how do you say, like, you know, she's five days old, you know, or six weeks, you know, because like for the first year or two, they're measuring in weeks, you know. And that was far less common vocabulary for people that are going through, say, college programs or learning as a second language, etc. Um, so we had to learn all of that. And oh yeah, all the diaper changing vocabulary, cradleboard vocabulary, all of that, you know. So it's that was uh like a crash course within that year, you know. So that that yeah, that was huge.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:43

Yeah, man, I would love to have some of those words.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:45

I don't think we've done it. We've got it. We've got it. I'll woke you up.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:49

Okay, we're done. But at the same time, it would have been so nice to to have those because there were so many words that I didn't know how to express that I wanted to ask, you know, or like say, right? Like, well, um like yeah, three weeks or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:05

That was our intention and just getting it all documented too, because like if if we're asking these questions as people that have been working in immersion for however many years at that point, how many other people ask those same same questions? So we're like, we we need to get this in a central place that's easy to easy for young parents to or old parents in our case to go and study up on that, you know?

SPEAKER_09 1:03:35

So what's your um like when you go in English spaces, or like what are your thoughts on that? Like, do you say, oh, there's gonna be English there, and we don't want to take them there? Or you know, what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:49

We we still take them out because there's just there's need for community in general, you know. It takes a village to raise kids, and um there's a lot of knowledge out there that's not in the language, also, you know, and we don't want to deny them that either. Um that said, like my daughters had like she had like zero motivation to speak English. Like if we had something on streaming and it was on English, she would straight up complain. Like she would come to me and uh she would call English watts. So like translating from Spanish, like they're all talking watts, todo habla watts. It was cute but funny, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:31

What does what's mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:34

Like, because she hears everybody say all these sentences that start with what?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:38

Okay, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:41

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. And then she would call uh what is it? Spanish was Manzana, Apple, and Ojibwe was Daga. Now we call them all by their actual names, but this was up until a couple weeks into kindergarten, this is what she was calling it.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:03

That's so cool, so sweet.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:05

Yeah, so it's just like yeah, zero zero motivation, and she's just like, well, she did get motivated at some point, and it's what motivated that though, is just the fact that it's like a survival language, too, you know, because um being raised with two minority languages in the home as your as your main first languages, you go out in public and nobody's talking that, you know, like nobody's talking Spanish in northern Minnesota unless you go to one of very, very few X-Mex restaurants, you know. We've got very few taquieras up here that have good tacos. We have to go all the way down to the Twin Cities for good tortillas, even. And you know what? It you have to really go out of your way to to find Ojibwe language spaces. You know, when we would be out on the playground or anything like that, they'd be interacting with other kids that would be wanting to play with them in English. And for the longest time, she all she knew how to say is, I was say, I five. So and and then once she got to school, it was very rapid, very rapidly taking on English within like four months. But like in the first couple of weeks, I had noticed because it wasn't just the classrooms, but it was also extended family, like uh like my family is all English speakers, you know. Like Erica's family is all Spanish speakers in Mexico, so that you know, it's easy for her to talk to them on the phone and everything. But when we would be interacting with my family, because there's no English, um I think well, even even going into having my first my first being born, my family is starting to express uh nervousness about it, I guess. I don't want to say disapproval, but there's like, you know, grandparents like, well, how am I gonna be able to talk to my grandkids, you know? And kind of coming out with like some attitude towards me about that, you know. And I'm just like, well, how are my kids gonna talk Ojibwe? You know, it's it's either that or it's gonna be delayed by like another 10 years and they're gonna learn it as a second language. If if they're gonna learn it as a first language, there's only one way to do it. We did it that way, but like, you know, sure enough, she she found it on her own with English, like uh just she was self-motivated just by listening to us in other public spaces. She figured out how to have very, very, very simple conversations. And then once she started going to uh school and rapidly picking up English, I think it was the first week or two. Um, she would I we would overhear her on the phone with my mom. She took the phone and goes, walks off to the other side of the house. We have our we heard her have a full conversation in English. And first time we hear her using like all these words, you know, grammar patterns, like all that. You know, it's it's a little rugged, you know, of course. Like just like anybody that's just learning a language for the first time, but like we were just amazed, but like, wow, like didn't know she knows those words. So, like, where'd she pick that up? You know, so but it's um so yeah, we we don't go out of our way so much because they they kind of self-regulate it. Um, I think there was also a big question too, and this was interacting with like the other language nest families too, like everybody was trying to figure out like their their language plan, their language policy for their families, you know. How how are we gonna handle English? You know, are we if my kid talks back to me in English, am I gonna ignore them and only talk Ojibwe back to them or pretend that I don't understand it? Things like that. And me, I was like, that's it's difficult. We're already playing on hard over here to doing with uh two minority languages. So I'm not gonna ignore my kids, you know. I'm I'm gonna so like to this day, my my daughter will talk mostly Spanish to me. Like, I don't understand all of it, and I'm really clear about them like I only understand some of those words. You're gonna have to find another way to tell me, you know, and she'll roll her eyes and just be like, okay, or she'll go to her mom and ask her mom to translate for me. So um, but that said, like she she can under, even though I don't have that as nearly as strong comprehension of Spanish as she does or as my daughter does Ojibwe, like she's I would say she's got like for speaker comprehension of Ojibwe. It's just she will answer me back in Spanish a lot. And I think that might just be habit now at this point, because if I tell her, hey, Dago Ojibwe Mutawashin, she'll be like, uh, flip the switch and she'll translate it. Um, and I also hear from all these other people in the community too. Like, oh no, I've I've never heard her speak speak a word of English. Like some of the people that worked with her in the language nest, and then others that say, like, no, we have full conversations in the language. And I'm just like, I wish you'd have a full conversation in the language with me. You know, I've been putting in these years of effort, you know. But it's it's it's validating though to hear that from other people in the community, knowing that she's talking Ojibwe and knowing that she understands me when I'm telling talking to her, you know, but it's it's just this interesting dynamic. Like we're we're definitely in experimental territory, the way that we're doing things. It's it's different than people that are just doing, say, um, Ojibwe language is a target language, and you know, English is the default everywhere else, you know, when when you're in like these dominant English language spaces, or or you're a first language first language English speakers. Um but yeah, for me, I'm I'm doing everything in what are second languages for me. Translating between Spanish and Ojibwe makes mind-blowing. Keeps me tired.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:27

I was gonna say, I can't imagine the headaches.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:30

Yeah, it's it's it's fun though.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:33

I don't know if I believe you.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:36

I mean, there's it's hard to come up with examples on the spot, you know. But like, you know, you can do all this wordplay between Ojibwe and English, you know. We can do even more wordplay when we work in Spanish too. But it's just like nobody understands it by us, but we're just cracking all kinds of trilingual jokes.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:55

That's so fun. What's a I'm sorry, uh quick diversion. Um, what do you call Spanish in Nishna Bemwin or Ojibwe Moen?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:04

Well, you know, when we were at Ojibwe Moltai, I I would hear a lot of these um first language English speakers or even some first language Ojibwe speakers, they would call it Spanish Moen. And that drove me nuts. You know, it I feel like it doesn't roll off the tongue well in Ojibwe or English or anything. So I started thinking, like, well, what do they call Spanish and Spanish? Espanol. Well, we don't have an L, but we have all those other sounds. So I I just call it Espanamoin. So, yeah, because because even you call Spain in Spanish, Espana. We've got those sounds, so I just call it Espanamoin.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:51

I was wondering because I was like, Oh, you probably have a better word than I would have, but I'm like, I just because they call um German Anamoin, right? Anmon moen. Is it an moen? Like I I think so. Well, that's what they call a German person, right? Monty?

SPEAKER_09 1:13:08

Yeah. Where we're at. Over this.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:12

Over this way, I think um I think German and perhaps all the Scandinavian languages, to my knowledge anyway, get called uh Ogongo Simolin.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:23

Oh yeah, oh yeah, I saw that in Richard uh oh yeah, yeah, we talked about that on Facebook.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:29

Yeah, yeah, like it's and I I asked about that too, like why do they call it Ogongo Simone? And I'm like, I don't know, they probably just thought they sounded all chattery, you know.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:43

So for our listeners, um, like that's like chipmunk too.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:49

Yeah, chip chipmunk language.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:51

Yeah, just uh the chipmunk language.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:53

Uh because I was like, what is this? Like, what is where did this come from? Yeah. Um I didn't mean to divert, I was just curious, like, yeah, because we we talk about stuff, and I was like, he probably has a great word for for that. Um yeah, where were we, where were we Monte U and I before I asked that.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:12

When I was giving my whole answer to, it's like I'll have other thoughts of like, you know, other little pathways of where I want to take the discussion to. I'm like, I'll I'll loop around back to that, and then I forget. Two sentences later, I'm like, what was that again?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:27

As I'm still still talking about this does tangential, so it's yeah, I'm worse. I think it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:35

It's probably a little bit of ADHD in there for me.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:38

Uh gaming. Um A D D. Um Yeah, well, you you kind of answered like a lot of these questions like as you were speaking that we kind of we kind of had. Um I guess I don't know if you already mentioned it or if you want to reiterate or or go the other way on like what have you found to be the the I know that we kind of talked about the the challenges, but what have you found to be like the most positive impact or surprise, like rewarding, maybe not expected, anything, anything like that, any big moments positive or learning moments that um that stick out with you and trying to do this. I know that it's a little bit more complicated when you add in another minority language, um, like you were saying. But um yeah, I know that like either one, like something that's really been impactful in a good way or something that's been really challenging.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:45

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton on both sides. I mean, I think I I mentioned some of the key challenges, I think is it's really just doing it all in second languages for me. It's just like you get to these points too, like say this morning. So this this morning I was trying to get my daughter ready for school. And um, you know, last night she was telling us, and that I don't know if they're doing like one of those theme or like student spirit weeks or something at our school. We didn't do them when I was growing up until I was in high school, you know. So to do that at elementary school seems kind of different to me, but you know, hey, it's 2025. Um but anyway, so like it sounded like maybe we didn't get the memo about a spirit week or something. And like she was just irate last night, just telling us like everybody's supposed to dress like elderly people or like grandparents, and she doesn't want to do it and she's not gonna go to school. We're just like, what? Like, and we're like looking in our emails, looking in our text messages to see if there's anything that went out from the school and nothing, you know. And so wake up in the morning and it's like, well, all right, well, just gonna get her dressed in normal clothes and send her out the door and wake her up and she's asking me, like, where are we going? Tell her school and she right back into the same fit, you know. It's it's not just that it's happening at the end of the day, but it's happening when she's half awake and she's expressing all this to me in Spanish, and I'm half awake, you know, like trying to make sense of what all these arguments are going on. And I'm just like, oh my god, like seriously, why are we gonna have this going on at 6 a.m.? So eventually it was like, I don't know, we just I couldn't convince her to go to go to class today, you know, and it's it sucks, but hey, you know, what what are you gonna do? You know, and on the other hand, too, it's like, why do kids have to stress out about these spirit weeks, you know, like worrying about you know all that, you know, shouldn't have to stress out about that.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:14

Yeah, but it's just fun, but it's it's there's pressure to get in and it makes it difficult to just be.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:23

So I mean that's one of the challenges that I encounter doing it in in what are both second languages for me, like when there's moments that I'm just like, uh like what are you telling me? Like and my and my comprehension to Spanish isn't isn't quite up to snuff on all of it, you know. Like I do not have a kindergarten level Spanish speaking ability, apparently. But I can sound really good ordering food. As for successes, though, like there's been a lot. It's it's hard to quantify exactly, but when she's teaching her little brother, who's just now starting to learn how to speak, and like he just turned one in January. No, not one. He turned, geez, dad brain, trilingual brain. Um, he just turned three in January. There we go. January's the first month. That's where I'm getting trip though. So he's just now getting to the point where he's starting to repeat a lot of stuff. So, like, I have to make a really concentrated effort to speak to him more, like more directly, which is also difficult because I'm not full-time employed doing the language nest that he's going to um and have other work responsibilities. Um, but I I still just have to do everything that I can to nourish his linguistic development. But it's just the fact that she's finally stepping in and helping and teaching, and she's super proud of him too. Like she'll come and tell me in Spanish, he's talking Ojibwe, you know. It's just all excited about it. But the other things is just like how she how my how my oldest has been demonstrating her comprehension of the language and not just the language, but like even like culture and cultural protocol. So, like this um was it this fall? Yeah, this fall. This fall I brought her to um big drum ceremony for the first time out at Malax. She hung in with me all day, like from about, I think we got there at like 10 a.m., 9, 10 a.m. And we didn't leave until 1 a.m. And she was there the whole time, stayed with me, just took like a like hour-long nap nap on my lap. I don't know if you all have ever been to one of those, but like they they talk Ojibwe through them throughout. Like there's very little. Well, this is this is this one probably had the most English translation I've ever seen, honestly. Other ones that I've been to over the years, like um, it would just be all in Ojibwe. And she understood everything just fine. Like, and when all those drum chiefs are standing up and doing their talks, she's like listening to each one of them. I think it was after the dinner break, they had like uh, I don't know how we would call it in Ojibwe. I don't even know. I'd put it in English. The best thing I can come up with is calling it like a special, like it's the Power World or something. It's almost like they're doing a special after dinner where they were having like a separate ceremony as part of the big drum ceremony. But it was they're doing like a breaking the bundle for somebody that had passed away a number of years ago. And you know, they're talking about what they're gonna do, talking about this person, what happened, um how they're gonna do this giveaway, how everybody's gotta dance for their their items, stuff like that. And so I ended up getting some of the items. And when I turned to her to explain, like, like, hey, I'm gonna have to get up and go, you're gonna have to stay here for a little while, you know. So I'm gonna get up and dance, you know. Like before I even said any of that, she already understood and she already knew. And she just turned to me and she just, aha, menuana goes in. It's like, all right, have fun, see ya. And just like sent me off to go dance. So, and she was fine just sitting there and watching and being on her own for the for that couple minutes. But just the fact that she understood those ceremonial protocols that were explained in the language, I was just like, wow, like that's uh that's major success. Like as somebody that's like a second language learner, if I didn't know the language or if I was just coming into that ceremony for the first time, I would probably have to see it done several times before I felt like uh even a level of confidence and with what I'm doing, you know. But she was just able to do it, and that was huge for me. Awesome. So yeah, just in things like that, there's there's lots of little things, but it's just it's just demonstrating that comprehension of of our ways. And I think too, like our language, there's so much that's encapsulated within it, like our um our traditional system of knowledge. So that would be like our epist epistemology, ontology, axiology. I've got words for all that, nojiway too. But all that is encapsulated within our language, you know, that it's essentially it's our our way of knowing, our way of being, our way of valuing things, all that's within the language, the way that we interact with each other, um, our word choices, the way we speak with one another, like it's all there. So that that's been one of the biggest reasons why I use Ojibwe language with my kids, because I feel like it's uh it's the only way that we're gonna be deeply thinking, like at that cognitive level, as an Ashanaq. I mean, there's there's tons of teachings that we can still accumulate within our lives as non-speakers, and there's a Tom that people do have that I'm extremely grateful for. So I don't want to talk down on anybody's knowledge by any means. Um, but it's just it's it's a completely different system of organizing knowledge within our brains. You know, if we're talking about it like at a cognitive level, it's like it's like braiding it together. If you're talking about it in the as like in a beating analogy, it's like you know, double stitching or whatever, you know. Everything's just stronger. There's all those connections, they're just woven together at that point. So that's just a big part of my motivation with it. Like there's this whole cognitive level of how do we organize information within our within our brains and our spirits, and doing that from an early, early formative level rather than doing it later on, where we're all stitching it together and trying to like almost like we're pat patching the broken parts of our brains, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:58

Double stitch.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:59

The thing things that we were denied, you know, as as uh within our generation, you know, just as a consequence of history. But we're we're bringing it together. We're gonna get there.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:10

Yeah, that's way meanwhile.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:14

For people that are learning what's like some resources that you would recommend for people, or if any, I mean, of course, we wanna be with fluent speakers as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:27

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that you can do. Like, like you said, being being around fluent speakers is one of the biggest. Um, if you're at a level where you can record and do like the transcription and translation, take on projects like that, that's huge also. Um, but when it comes to actual just like building up your vocabulary, building up that base and grammar, um, for me, it was some like I mentioned at the beginning, um, some of those Rick Greshik materials, those are really nice, nicely organized, easy to digest. Um Oshkabe was a native journal. That's like a great location for just, you know, you got the CDs, the audio, um, and the transcription to be able to read it. That's like the next best thing, you know, to to sitting with a fluent speaker. Um aside from that, I spend a lot of time in the Ojibwe People's Dictionary, specifically with the word parts. Like when, like if you scroll down on a particular entry, you can see how it's broke breaks up the morphemes with the initials, medials, finals, and then you can select those medials. Also, you know, the advanced search feature to be able to search partial words or keywords. Like that's huge, also for just being able to figure out um, I mean, I I basically taught myself what W stems and y stems are from exploring OJ White People's Dictionary. And that's like the that determines like plurals and diminutives and all pejoratives, all of that. Like, is it going to be uh ish or an osh, you know, eints, onts, ain't, you know, aunts, all of those. Uh all that's just determined by like where it's being connected and what type of syllable or vowel it's on. I don't know if I can explain it necessarily, but I understand it now. Um and then um the other the other resource that was really big for me too, um, Rand Valentine has this dictionary program called uh Western Ojibwe Dictionary. And I think last last time I emailed him, he was talking about maybe getting trying to get like a what do you call it, like a developer credential through like the Apple App Store to be able to host it on there. But as is right now, because he's not like an approved developer, you know, um I had a hard time even trying to install it because just security features on Apple computers now, and they're like, this isn't approved. But I I figured out a way to get it working and everything. Um and it'd be great to see it rolled out further instead of just being kind of like this this kind of underground, whoever knows about it and has permission to use it kind of thing. But with that, you can it has like this conjugate verb feature, and you can basically like select a VTA, hit conjugate verb, it'll give you all 75 of the basic conjugations. Drop down menu, you can switch it to conjunct, imperative, uh standard form. Um, and then you can switch the modes between you know, preterite, dubitative, preterite, dub dubitative, and just standard, and then also like negative and positive and every combination thereof. So it's like for being able to learn all those verb paradigms, that was huge for me. Um, especially for VTAs, I really like how it's organized. Uh, it was really easy for me to see where the patterns are, um, and to just be able to start chunking those out because you know, I I only took up to Ojibwe level two in college. They didn't offer advanced or master level courses where I went. Um, all that's just been done in person with elders and everything. So it's, and then just exploring these resources and trying to make sense of it and take it apart on my own. But yeah, I thought that was a really, really, really great resource that's not very well known, also, but it's super powerful when it comes to like how all those paradigms are just built right into it. Otherwise, you know, you might get it in like a college lecture if you're lucky, you know, or or at Ojibwe Moltaida, maybe, but yeah, those are some of the Biggest resources for me.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:01

That was awesome. I have a quick question too for you. I'm sorry. When you look at those things and you use those things, how do you use them or study? Like what's your strength if you have one? Like, do you do like five minutes every day? Do you, you know, this hour you have a break? You usually take the time. Do you do it at nighttime in the evenings, all day long? Like during work? Like, how have you maintained that consistent learning or gotten there? What time? Yeah. You do you understand what I'm asking?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:37

Or just all of the above.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:38

Um kind of all of the above. Like I, you know, because I wasn't, I wasn't in a class doing it, I didn't have like a structure assigned to me. It was just trying to figure out a structure that works for me. So, like, say for VTAs, what I did was um I would just take it little bit by little bit. When I worked at OJ Bung Altaida, we actually worked on this. Um, we tried to work from this kind of philosophy of um, we call it like three, five, seven in immersion. And it the concept there was that your brain can take on maybe up to about seven different concepts before it starts to go in one ear and out the other. So on any particular lesson, we would start with like maybe three vocabulary words. Once students that have that down, add in another two. Once they got that down, add in another two, and then hold. And that's generally what we would try to do. And we ended up finding other ways around that. And that was actually working within morphemes because it's more multiplicative, the way that you can recombine them. And uh, it was actually auto coins that I had seen first doing that, and it just blew my mind. And I was like, there is way more efficient ways of learning vocabulary than rote memorization of these long words, like lists of these long words, you know. And my my vocabulary learning just took off in terms of like all of a sudden it was just I could understand once I started working on word parts, you know, then I was uh understanding words that I hadn't heard before the first time that I hear them spoken. Um or even being able to say words that I've never said before or maybe even heard before, and they're still understood just fine.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:23

Yeah, because you understand the word parts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:25

Yeah. But I backtracking a little bit, I I didn't really mention how I how I learned those morphemes, though. Um I was putting together a a lesson plan on like advanced weather for weather terms and geop geo geography type terms for students out at Malax Reservation. And I would be up until like three in the morning. I wasn't even at my laptop or anything at that point. It's just that these morphemes were still stuck in my head. And I'm just laying there trying to sleep, recombining word parts in my head, you know, for hours. And that's after like a couple weeks of that, it just clicked. And it's like, okay, I guess it works now. Like that that helped me overcome. Um, you know, in my adult learning, I've probably gone through like three, three or four major plateaus where learning starts to atrophy. And I've found ways to break through them. But sometimes I'll be on those plateaus for maybe years at a time, you know, before you even realize like what you need to do to break past it or or where you're stuck. You know, I I I've heard uh a lot of people and people mentioned on your podcast too, it's like keeping that list of what you don't know or what you want to know. But that's that's hard too, you know. So it's especially if you don't always have like a you're not so techie or you don't always have like a pen on you. Like it's just like you might just be driving and something pops in your hand, you're like, oh, I'm not gonna remember that in five minutes. But I wish I had would ask about that, you know. So that's something I need to get better at myself, you know. But I think for like say the VTAs anyway, geez, I'm really hopping back and forth. It was identifying where some of these patterns are and sticking to that 357 so I don't overwhelm myself. The first ones that really start stood out to me was the passive conversation, uh passive conjugation. So like the ego, because those are just like VAIs, ego yan, yun, uh, egout, you know, it's all the same V VAI endings. Um but then um when I started figuring out the like first person and third person, like me, me to you, uh, or no, not me to you, me to he or she or me to them. That's when I realized too that um to make it plural, all you add in is like an extra syllable. So it's like let's see, I should use an actual example. So like we do koag when I help him or her, we do kawagwa when I help them. So it's got the ug attack on the agua, and then when you do the same thing for when you help them, that ug is just uh ud instead. So it's like odd, adwa. So I would pair those all together, like ug, agua, od, adwa, because there's already eating patterns there, and I would always kind of stick those ones together.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:47

I'm staring at my VTA put on the walls after speaking with McGizet on like okay, resetting goals and whatnot. And so as you're talking, I was like, okay, yeah, there's AG, and then there's AG WAA, like a gua, and so I really like and appreciate that um those groupings or those strategies for those groupings.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:09

I was just gonna say, uh, if you could uh share something in Ojibwe Moon to other learners, if you have a message for them in Ojibwe Moon, you can share that.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:23

Uh-huh. Oh, gagma in the game. Uh me to go bae bungi, gagoba main again, gago baba man again a feature zanagak, and an under kekane the mongi away and kidding waving and on. Anangi pokush karmagak, uh gesish karmaga, babangi, kakin away getamen, ye we gik in a shnabe giken dar soin. A manjigo gekain the man, ye we kidding waving on, each bin mean mangija be bangi, nesidotaman, mija gagego kikan so one, uhi, bimimuyan. Mamway dash, kin a went, gakinege go, kitayamin ja minosemakak, kinege go manishnabe or king. Keno goingo shaga kinoy orga kenazin, kakinegego, skidash, echmangi, wabuayanakeda wea, minikba madazit, goingana bajwin, ogekanazin, iwe uhinjai gewin, manika uhiga win, miko nasa vi shin oyagi ojiga it, minikba madazit, going gana bajwin, ogekanazin, wabuway anika win. Me it go babangi bemewaduyang upiton edition, bimu doyin gaiegeen. It's basically like um, you know, don't worry if it's difficult to learn the language when you're when you're on your journey seeking out the language. You know, it's trying to oh geez, even looking for the English for this now. Like um not everything has been whole that's been being handed down to us, like everything's been kind of broken into pieces, so we're we're still holding on to to everything that we still can. And it's more than we were given as kids. So to be able to pass anything on, we're all doing what we can. We all hold pieces of the puzzle. Nobody is a master at everything. Like we all have specialized knowledge and things that we know that other people don't know, and that's the same, whether you're a fluent speaker or a second language speaker, or somebody that doesn't know any language whatsoever, or any Ojibwe language whatsoever. We've all got bits and pieces. So uh I think that's the best way I can kind of put it, just kind of going on at the at the moment like that. It's like it's it's yeah, it's it's it's still good, whatever you whatever it is that you carry.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:17

Walk all in.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:19

Yeah, you you can't ask somebody that's been building houses their whole life to you know talk about blanket making, and you can't ask the same thing of somebody that's been making blankets their whole life to talk about carpentry. You know, we it's all specialized.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:18

You know all.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:19

Yeah, I I I want to offer the a moment to uh plug anything too, if there's anything that you are looking to plug. Um no pressure though, but if there's anything that people want to check out or support, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:33

Sure. Well, you know, all all of our all of our immersion schools out there are all you know underfunded and understaffed. So um, you know, I I I helped to form the Indagina Taugang Red Lake Charter School. So if if there's any generous funders out there that wants to to help us out, you know, can get in contact. We're not hard to find. Redlake Charterschool.com. Yeah, otherwise, yeah, it's it's been great being here with you all, and and I I look forward to the next time we cross paths, hopefully sooner than later.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:12

Yeah, us as well. All right.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:17

Uh minimum.

SPEAKER_06 1:41:30

Thanks so much for listening to our podcast and weighing our sound. To reach us by email, find us at our sound period podcast at gmail.com. You can find all of our links to buy me a coffee, Patreon, Instagram, etc., at our Link Tree, which is linktr period e slash N Waying.our sound. Our theme song was done by myself, Neen Mashkoka Wudkwe, and artwork completed by Nishime, my younger brother, Brent Beauchamp. Jimmy Gwench.