Inside a small classroom in the basement of St. James Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s North Side, a centuries-old language is finding new voice.
Once a month, about 30 people gather here to learn to speak their families’ native language of Ojibwe.
It’s a language that has been in danger of being lost.
“The native languages are dying,” says Dr. Dorene Wiese, President of the American Indian Association of Illinois. “Most of the languages are taught or spoken by older people, so the younger people aren’t learning.”
For the last 40 years, Weise has worked in the American Indian Community, focusing much of her efforts on reviving her ancestral language.
The Ojibwe Indians — also known as the Chippewa — are among the largest group of Native Americans in North America, with about 150,000 in the U.S. alone.
“Some people say this is our renaissance. This is our recovery. Where we are beginning to not be afraid to bring out our languages, our religion, our culture, our music and our dance — and share it with other people,” says Weise.
As part of the workshop, the association’s drum group performs a popular Pow Wow dance known as the Jingle Dress Dance Song.
Children learn about animals through arts and crafts. And in this case, by matching animal paw prints to their Ojibwe names.
Families are encouraged to attend the classes together, so that they can learn the language and speak it with one another at home.
Sarah Jimenez, who studied the Ojibwe language at a school in Canada, is using this class as a place to practice what she learned years ago.
“If you don’t use it, you lose it, Jimenez says. “So I’m re-integrating it again into my everyday language. If I see an elder — there are few elders here — I’ll actually say ‘hi, how are you?’ And my pronunciation is kind of loose and they help me with that,” she says.
Because the language was traditionally passed on orally from person to person, it was never written down, so today it is being taught phonetically.
For example, “Waaboozoonhs” is the Ojibwe pronunciation for the word meaning “rabbit.”
Of the approximately 3,000 Ojibwe Indians in Chicago, there are only five fluent speakers — and Georgina Roy is one of them. She’s also one of only two Ojibwe language teachers in Chicago.
“Our ancestors, they suffered. They suffered so much to bring us this language, and how could we not honor our elders and not speak our language?” she says.
Part of that suffering, says Weise, came in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, when American Indian children were taken out of their homes and forbidden to speak their native language.
“In the United States, communities had their children taken away from them and put into boarding schools,” says Lenore Grenoble, Linguistics Professor at the University of Chicago. “Those children were punished for speaking their languages in the boarding schools, and this has been one of the most horrific things that has happened to Native American languages.”
Grenoble, who has studied shifting and endangered languages for more than 15 years, says it’s critical to revitalize a language before it becomes endangered.
“Seriously endangered languages on the brink of extinction have only a handful of elderly speakers,” Grenoble says. “So if you want to revitalize it, you’re much better off catching it when some of the children still speak it.”
And that’s why linguists like Grenoble and educators like Wiese say the future of languages such as Ojibwe rest with the children who learn to speak it today, and they in turn can pass it on to generations to come.
“It’s important because it’s the foundation of our history,” says Wiese. “Because it’s not written, it’s recorded in the stories — not only of our families but of our people and our relationships with other tribes and the U.S. Government. These are embedded in the words and the language.”
