By Allison Kronberg/Murphy News Service
University of Minnesota American Indian studies professor Erik Redix has tapped syrup out of about 100 maple trees on the Duluth campus, along with the help of his students- all in the name of preserving his language and culture, which is at risk of dying out.
Redix’s great grandparents were the last generation in his family to speak the indigenous Ojibwe language as a first language. The majority of Ojibwe reservations in the nation have experienced the same loss of language. And many young people have not learned the language from the last generation of speakers, which are now mostly in their 80s or older.
Efforts such as Redix’s to preserve the language through immersive activities are becoming more common due to increased funding, recognition and positive feedback, Redix said. He received a $50,000 two-year McKnight Land-Grant award in January. But there’s still much work to be done before the language is safe, he said.
“At UMD, we’re fortunate enough right here on campus to be able to give students this amazing experience,” Redix said about maple tapping. “That’s kind of the highlight of the class is being able to go outside and actively do this.”
Here on the Twin Cities campus, Ojibwe preservation is being talked about, too. American Indian studies professor and historian Brenda Child spoke in Coffman Memorial Union recently about Ojibwe language loss in her family and the new era of revitalization.
Child, along with the American Indian studies department, used Minnesota Historical Society Legacy grants in 2012 to create the Ojibwe People’s dictionary, an online resource with 30,000 audio recordings of native Ojibwe speakers.
“People tend to think of historic preservation as preserving an old building or something like that.” Child said. “But for Ojibwe people … we want to preserve our culture, our language and our traditions.”
Ojibwe is the heritage language of more than 200,000 Ojibwe people living in the United States and Canada —many of them in Minnesota. Even the word for the river that runs through Minnesota and the heart of the United States, the Mississippi River, is an Ojibwe word.
When the United States government established reservations for Ojibwe and other Native American tribes, the reservations’ policies pressured assimilation and learning English, Child said.
On her own reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota, only about 10 percent of the population speaks Ojibwe, Child said. And those elders want more young people to learn the language, she said.
More than 100 programs in Minnesota provide exposure native languages like Ojibwe, according to a 2011 legislative report, but many don’t use immersive techniques like those in Redix’s class.
“People need to be immersed in the language to produce speakers, otherwise they’ll only know how to count to ten or something,” Child said.
For some, like American Indian studies senior and one of Redix’s students Morgan Rose, the Ojibwe language is hard to learn.
Rose, a non-native, began learning the language her sophomore year and has kept with it, in part because of Redix’s teaching techniques.
Along with tapping maple trees, Redix has also encouraged Rose to harvest wild rice, compete in language knowledge competitions and volunteer at a language immersion preschool on campus.
Rose said she is unsure of whether the children she works with will continue speaking Ojibwe after they leave the school.
“At some point I think it will be up to them whether they want to go forth and learn more language, and I hope that they do choose to do that,” Rose said.
With new money, more teaching and a more positive attitude toward language preservation, Redix said, the last challenge to preserving the language may be determining where the it fits in in today’s English-language-dominated society.
But just as Ojibwes don’t have a word that means “goodbye” in their language, many Ojibwes also don’t plan to say goodbye to their language – at least without making an effort to preserve it.
“It’s our heritage here in Minnesota,” Child said. “It’s not just mine, but it’s everybody’s heritage here.”
Reporter Allison Kronberg is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.