 I worked with the Ojibwe Culture Foundation between 2006 and 2011, and then from 2011 to 2017, August 2017, I worked for a Lakeview School in Chiging, with a program called Anishina Abemalan Revival Program. Prior to that, 2002 to 2006, I worked for Chiging First Nation on a program called Kinamadoq, and that means they are teaching each other, they are teaching each other. The idea there was, we have all these land claim research going on. We wanted to make our own archives there and record our elders. So I've been recording elders since 2002, while I should actually say, when I did my master's program, I recorded elders in that as well. So I've been recording elders since 1999, I think, 1999. And then when I recorded the elders, my idea was that we need to set down a record of natural speech instead of how, when people learn to speak Ojibwe, they sometimes will use a book. I use books, I don't mind them, and courses where you just learn to construct sentences, which is fine too. But at one point, you need to actually transgress that sentence and word building blocks and get into actual natural sounding speech. So I decided that I was getting tired of just learning to speak, say, Anishinaw and stuff like that. But we had to actually make it so that you learn, have something to aspire to. So the programs, I'm no longer affiliated with any program because I'm actually in the first year PhD history program at York University. That I have experience in the preservation of language as well as publication of our language, as well as learning to speak it as a second language, although I'm not fluent. Some people think I am, but I learned quite a bit. What I wanted to do with these programs was to get our school programs have a more enriched Anishinaw Ben-Win program right from elementary school, grade one, and I saw it going all the way to university. And so that's why I recorded these elders to actually get them to share different stories. Some are just silly stories, funny stories, others are pretty big legends, and then others are actual historical tales. So I wanted the whole age group, and I believe in this lifelong learning, that what I found is that you should actually be working with your kids to try and learn and reinforce as much of what they've learned in school at the kitchen table at home, either at the breakfast table when you are together and then we're at the dinner table when you are together to actually start learning to speak about eating at least. We did a program like that, a breakfast program at Lakeview School, and so we were trying to get families to work together on that. It didn't really, I don't know how much, how successful it was. We had some of the teaching staff at Lakeview School actually were able to learn some of those languages, and we used different tools because we know people are busy, so we made different units on a software program that's online called Quizlet, and you could actually use that to practice learning the nouns, and then after you learn the nouns, then you learn a verb about it, and then after you learn a verb about it, you learn another verb, a descriptive verb first I should say, and then you learn a verb of you acting upon it, and then so this is what we would call building it up. So at first let's say you, the adult or the student, this is actually part of the program at Lakeview School, they'll learn the word machine-man for apple, and then they'll learn the word daemon for strawberry. But these are both different categories of nouns, the ones animate, the others inanimate. So what we wanted them to do is to learn how to differentiate the two because if you don't know the difference between them you're going to make a mistake because the next part is you choose a verb, and that verb will actually have to be in agreement with whether the item is animate or inanimate. So you can't say manapugose daemon, you've got to say manapugut daemon, likewise you can't say manapugut shiman, you've got to say manapugose shiman. So that means just the apple or the strawberry tastes good. Sometimes you've got to then say I want to eat an apple, so you'd say damwam shiman, but you can't say damwam daemon, you've got to say mejen, mejen daemon, I'm eating a strawberry. But you can't say mejen shiman. So you've got to sort this all out, and what we do is through drills we get them to try and learn that. So a lot of people kind of look down on these drills, but that's how I ended up learning what I know, is I was drilling myself, I was learning it, writing it, trying to practice what was animate, inanimate, and choosing to write verbs that went with it because you don't get to speak to speakers all the time in our current life, current society. A second language learner sometimes doesn't have the privilege of having their parent or grandparent who speaks anymore, and so you actually have to supplement this void with other materials. So books are going out of fashion, and a lot of people can't read the language, but now what we've got are these electronic stuff that people are using a lot, but you've got to structure it in a way, and people got to stick with it, and stay with it, and use it, and then speak it. So my thing is the age group has actually been lifelong learners, and to try and build into that, that the parents and the children are learning together. We had one family actually that we're doing quite well, but then that's the thing, you got to sustain it, and then you got to move, you got to move past it onto the next thing. So if the child actually was able to say, I'm eating an apple, then they were able to say, you can't say, you've got to change the verb, you've got to change the verb, and to another form, you've got to conjugate it, but the linguists say conjugate it. So the children were actually able to do this in grade three at Lakeview School. They would say, in Damwa, Menpokoset, Mishiman, I'm eating a tasty apple, or I'm eating an apple that tastes good. So they were able to do that, and that's a lot more than some college and university students that, and it took me like five years to learn how to do that. So similarly, the child would then say, Nijin Menpokok Damin, I'm eating a tasty strawberry. So that was what we were able to get them to do was start building sentences and then using multiple verbs in one sentence, which has actually been a challenge for people. So we wanted all this programming to actually fit in with what the stories the elders are telling. So like I mentioned, I record these elders, that's the goal. We want the students to actually be able to sit there and listen to an elder tell a story and then preferably paraphrase that back and retell that story back to somebody else. We're not there yet, we're not nowhere near there yet. But the thing is we have it recorded and we're trying to look at different methodologies of how we can get the students to actually do this. And the other thing that I've often talked about why I would record these elders, I look at that as the well, the well of our language in a sense, as we're losing our elders in our community anyway, and they're not being replaced by speakers. So we need to actually document that and make a library or an archive, but I call it a well, because back in the day people would come to the well, get water and take it home. So that's the idea here with this digital archive, what these stories is that people then come and listen to these stories online and if they have enough understanding, then they're able to take something back to their kids, to their family, to their kitchen table and share that with others. So that's why I call that a well. You come and get your water at the well, community well, take it back to your house, pour water for the rest of your family or cook with that or whatever you're going to do with that water, wash up, you're going to then share that water in your house. And that's how I look at this. The other thing is now you've used that water up, now you've got to go back to the well. So that's why I call it a well, you keep going back to that. So what we've done with those other interviews is we've transcribed them word for word. And then sometimes we put an English translation, but I didn't want to do that. And what I did instead is we made a glossary to go with each transcript. So the idea is that if somebody is really, really wants their language, they can follow along the elder who's saying what the transcript and read along with that. A lot of people say they're visual learners. So when people talk about being a visual learner, I often thought they were talking about images, but others actually mean that they have to see it written and match what that person is saying to the written word. And then they start to understand the writing system. So I've seen people do this. I was teaching adults last year at Lakeview School. And they were actually able to start listening to these videos, and that was the assignment was a, I had, let's say I had five students on a given night. We did a 10-minute video, and each student in the class did a two-minute section to transcribe. Of course, they didn't get 100%, but they got a lot of the words in there. And then we went through it and covered it, and we transcribed it again. And then the next task was then we made the glossary, put down the words, and then they came up with the translation themselves. And then after they had the translation, then they understood the word, and then they were able to then try and use that in their everyday life in some actual different ways. So to get back to this adult language class, then one of the students that I was really impressed with and quite pleased with her progress, she would say, oh, I'm going to bust this out tomorrow on the speaker at work. So then she would go in and she'd try whatever new word she learned at the class, and then she would say that to the speaker, and then the speaker at work was getting really impressed with her progress as well. So he liked that, and they both built a relationship on that. So those are, to me, those are some of the successes that we have with this, that program was the adults that were coming to that program in the evening actually started to build up their comprehension of oral Nishnabemwin. And then secondly, they were actually building up their utility of writing Nishnabemwin. And then furthermore, then they were actually building up their communicative competence by taking it out into the community and trying it with different speakers. So the same thing with the kids. One of the things that we fell upon was some of them, we tried to get them to use the language more and that was the, that's the hard part is the kids don't, they don't make it in their head that they actually have to do this, that they can do this outside of the classroom. They seem to think Ojibwe is just for the one hour that we have them. So we got to try and get them to speak it outside the classroom more. And so we made units for them, especially in November, this was a successful one. It was a unit on hockey. So we're trying to get them to do a bit more on hockey. And then for June, like, we got them, we have a powwow at Lakeview School in June. And so we got them a unit on powwow as well. So we got them to say different things like I'm wearing a shawl, I'm wearing leggings, I'm wearing a bustle, those kind of things. And so they had to learn those words. And then we put an interactive game to say the boy is wearing a bustle, the boy is wearing a roach, all these kinds of words that, and it wasn't really what we're trying to do is not get them to memorize the phrases, not stock memorization, we're actually getting them to learn the words and that they are then able through these exercises and drills to select the correct words that go with the correct clothing item. So for instance, again, there are, there are animate and inanimate clothing items. So one, an example of an animate clothing item is, is a necklace. So you'd say not co-ogon, be squaw, not co-ogon, I'm wearing a necklace. But then if you, you have other, you talk about that roach, masquas agan, masquas agan biskan, I'm wearing a roach. So you got to learn the right word, the right verb, you got to say biskan or biskwa. So it's, it's, you can't just say one for the other, you're going to be making an error. So the kids were learning that, the students were learning that, that's the, the learning objective was to get them to differentiate between the two and then to choose the right verb and then to use their language and to, to try and sort out information. The other thing is in this regard with the indigenous education in that sense, we didn't want it to just all be about legends and then, or people keep referring back to this school year, the calendar school year and we did that too. But that actually, when you look at that, that's been done in the 80s, late 80s and people still keep remaking that, but they don't add on to it and it should actually spiral up. So what we decided to do is we're going to try and make that information, I say spiral up in the sense that in September to June, maybe you cover the same type of activities, each year you add on more complex information and you make that explicit that you're actually adding on more information. So the kids, when they do the pow-wow stuff, maybe in grade one, they learn, they learn simple, simple material about how to dance, what they're dancing and that and then the following year they learn more about the clothing and then they learn to describe it more and talk about it more and then after a while, the idea is then they start to talk about different actors because when I mean actors, there's seven actors in Ojibwe, I, you, me, he, we, exclusive, we, inclusive, you, plural and they. So we have all these things to try and teach them but each of those are indicated by different affixes and suffixes and prefixes on a word. So it's a lot, a lot of information that we're trying to convey and again, just to make it, make a explicit reference back to what the elders are saying, those videos, then after a while the students, adult students and elementary school students, when they're listening to those videos, they actually then start to listen or hear about, hear the suffixes that they've been learning and then they start to understand their actual oral comprehension is increased because then they know that if they hear at the end of a word meh, then they know it means we and then if they hear at the end of a word wuk, a verb, then they know it's they. So they start listening to these audio clues and they're starting to pick up a bit on who is actually doing what. So you see these little bits of success when they're going through and if you listen to an elder speak in Ojibwe, it's really fast because it's just natural speech. They're not slowing down to be deliberately and speak slowly and deliberately. They're just talking. They want to communicate. We want to get the students to see and to actually aspire to speak that fluidly. That's the goal. So that's why we rely on those elder interviews to get them to actually the students that start thinking this is where I want to be. This is how well I want to speak and this is the command I want to have of our language. So I look at that as lifelong learning in that they end up looking at trying to have in second language theory they talk about this that it should your language program and your language lessons should be just beyond your comprehension but not too far beyond your comprehension. If it's too far beyond your comprehension you get discouraged but if it's just beyond your comprehension but you have enough that you're almost understanding then that actually inspires you to try and learn and understand more and it's kind of the analogy is the carrot on the stick that you actually say oh I'm almost understanding this. If I just knew this I'd be able to understand so when you try and learn a bit more and you try to incorporate that into your learning. So we wanted to blend that in there so if we just made this all about legends and about history and about the past it would I think it would fall on the it would fall down in a sense because then where what they would say was we're ossifying our language we're making it something static but if you listen to speakers today that are they grew up with it and they talk about anything they can talk about anything in our language in our language is still growing but just amongst that group that age group we want that growth language growth to start occurring at elementary school student level and that's what we're aspiring to do and it's it's a hard it's hard work but we want them to actually learn to actually manipulate words at what linguists would call a morphological level that's where our language gets really descriptive that's where people really start to have a fun time changing the pronunciation of words and that's why you see Anishinaabe people always laughing when they're talking to each other as they they end up making these puns they change the word and then they start laughing. So to me I know a lot of people get into language and I did myself to really understand more about myself my history and that but the the actual thing is that sometimes people actually just want to get in on the joke and they want to learn to laugh about how our native sense of humor is conveyed in Anishinaabe everyone so I think that we really need to expand more on on our and not make our language such a sacred thing I think we got to make it look more take it back a bit more and make it an everyday thing and something that we we really use how to speak the actual speakers use it now to just joke around it and that's what I think we're kind of losing in some sense is that people just want to use it to pray to the ancestors and that's that's a necessary part but if in the end if that's all we're doing it's going to end up like Latin where you just use it for prayer and we don't want it we don't want that's not I don't think that's the goal our goal is to actually revitalize this language in our everyday lives and in our everyday education so we need a more expansive definition of culture there's a lot of people to still to a lot Anishinaabe people hockey is a big part of their culture and then to say that it isn't and that that and maybe some of the people don't bother going to a powwow or maybe they're not made a they they're just they they play hockey they they go to bingo but they want to speak their language and I think that that's actually one part that of our language programs that actually should be be encouraged mind you I think there's enough them being going or language programs anyway I don't bother with that but that's what people want so I think we got a whole lifelong learning journey and that's what this program and what I've been working at for number of years is try to make varied language materials for varied age groups and try to match that material to those age groups wherein it actually builds upon their motivation to learn more whether or not I've been successful at that is up to other people I know I just keep going and I try to reflect upon what we've made and trying to and try to test the units see what they're actually acquiring one of the main things though that we found with the Anishinaabe everyone revival program at Lakeview was that retention was an issue so we got to work on work on that so after the kids would do the students would do a unit for a month or two months they actually were were acing it and they were really doing really well they they really surprised me a number of them but now it's two years since that child was able to we used these cards these visual aids and they were just random so this one student we do is like this gets back to that apple and and strawberry story I was talking about but this one was turkey and and roast beef so you are our co my co-worker would make a card I told her make a card first was just the roast beef and turkey so then the children learned the words for that then the next part was she put a finger a thumbs up or a thumbs down to mean that they like it or they don't like it and then on the other corner of the card she put either a nose or a mouth so meaning that you smell it or you taste it so then the the kids ended up learning to decode that said that I like both roast beef I like the taste of turkey next thing we did was we either put it in a fryer or in an oven so then the kids ended up learning to say I like roast beef that is I like beef that is roasted or I like beef that is fried meaning hamburger and then the the turkey was I like deep fried turkey now they have these big deep fried the deep fryer is for turkey or I like roasted turkey turkey cooked in an oven and the kids were able to do that and then they were able to make that into turn that into a negative sentence and this is where it blew me away that they said I don't know I do not like turkey that is roasted in the oven which was just awesome I was I was blown away that they were able to do that so trying to make it every day language use but trying to also be mindful at the same time there's attention between everyday language use and then also trying to make these cultural cultural in the sense of what you do every day and then cultural traditions so looking at cooking turkey and stuff but we also had that whole unit was on food and we had deer meat and moose meat included in there as well as well as all kinds of fish so we we try to cover the gamut there of peoples every day everyday lives and everyday diet to try and make that unit as effective as possible well to me an indigenous education I kind of myself I try to just say Nishinaabe education I don't like for different reasons when we lump ourselves all in together as an indigenous education because indigenous can be Navajo Dine or can mean Tlingit or it can be what we say not away but they call themselves Haudenosaunee and they have different ways than we do so I like to I prefer to say that we're trying to strive we're striving for Nishinaabe education so in the principles this is of course a lot of people would say is just that your mind body spirit that's all a part of that that you actually try to put those all together and develop all those together oh and your body so those four elements of your of yourself based on a medicine wheel that people talk about and then there's different teachings that I've heard that different from different elders that we try to incorporate but we don't really make it so explicit or overt in these language programs per se we try to make it more imbued and more subtle that you actually have it in there because part of to me part of an inherent part of Nishinaabe education is that it was intuitive when we look at our storytelling tradition the storytellers used to tell the story they didn't explain it they didn't explain what it meant you were to think about what it meant and then when you had a question then you go tell ask the storyteller or your grandparent why did this happen in this story what part why does this happen there then you reflect on that more and then that story is supposed to help you and that's what the Nishinaabe education is what they in the Zyaganash call a reflexive the the stories are reflexive as well as these teachings and then that's why in our language there's two ways that they've seen people translate the word teachings once a kinamalge win but that would be more properly pedagogy teaching kinamalge he teaches kinamalge win the act of teaching and then the other word when i see for teachings is kinamadwin kinamadwinan and when you make it that to say kinamawa i taught that person but if we're teaching each other we say kinamadme we're teaching each other and when you add that d at the end of the word it makes it a mutually reflexive verb so when we say kinamadwin it means then the the teachings in the sense that it's reflective that means it's it's actually impacting you but you are also impacting it there's a there's a a deeper philosophical meaning of why that word is structured that way kinamadwin kinamadwin it's actually something that's uh back and forth there's a back and forth element to that and that's what our our philosophy of language is in a sense and to me i think of that more as uh in the sense that there's a spirit in that teaching not necessarily nano bojo or panis or whoever there's just a spirit in that actual teaching in the story in the words or in the image or in the design the motif and then that is what is to elicit in you thought thought process and then as you think about that more deliberate upon that more then that's when it actually starts to impact you and then you you could start to say you're becoming educated for that so i i think of that as an ishnabah education i used to talk to this one fellow eddy king with his name eddy kingba and what i liked how he talk about this he had a different teaching of different configuration of the seven grandfathers but i think it was five of them five of them were the same as the the ones that are in the michelmas book and two are different but they're essentially the same anyway we're quibbling over english words but to me what he used to talk about a lot was the arrow head and he'd use this on these pictographs that are petroglyphs sorry that are at the peter bro petroglyphs and then you talk about that that three the arrow has three points and he says when you when you when you draw your bow back with that arrow and you're looking at that arrow head and then you're reminded of that first point and you think when you're going to take that life do i practice the seven grandfathers with mother earth and then that means it's you're talking about all of creation and when you're looking at that point on the arrow head you're looking at the kill kill that deer or whatever it is am i doing this in an honorable way in a truthful way in a humble way am i going to respect this animal do i love this animal and then the next point on that arrow head same thing do i love the creator do i respect the creator am i truthful with the creator and then that last point on that arrow head do i have the seven grandfathers with myself and then that was what that was as a mnemonic device that eddy king used to talk about this is a mnemonic device everything that we used to use as an ishnabah people actually had that element in there so then he says once you you reassured yourself that you have practiced the seven grandfathers with creation with the creator and with yourself then you were able to take that life so i look at it that way as well and then other times i go to a sweat with um she can call him she can or our uncle and then he would say that too he says maybe you notice seven grandfathers i don't know he'd say he always asks questions that's his teaching style asking rhetorical questions then he'd say you know it isn't just this physical realm we're talking about there's actually are you able to practice seven grandfathers in the spirit world are you able to practice seven grandfathers with your senses with your sight with your hearing with your smell with your touch says are you able to practice those seven grandfathers with your five senses so he has uh when we think about it that then we start to get an idea a bit more about what this idea of holistic education is and we put those together what these different elders are teaching putting together and that's when we get a better idea of what this nishinaabe education is how we're trying to convey to students and again i just have to reiterate that to me nishinaabe education is never ending then it's a lifelong journey and so the same thing with our language we always try to learn more and more with our language but also with this spirit trying to learn with the spirit and then trying to learn with your fellow nishinaabe as well as you try to learn more about your body your mind your spirit and then also your heart so you're trying to learn all this time to put this all in balance and of course every day life something's going to throw something off balance there and then it's your job to put that all back in balance so that's the aspiration of nishinaabe education is that minamadzuin and everyone i shouldn't say everyone knows that but you hear that a lot you see it a lot but sometimes i think it just and it has ended up becoming a catchphrase or a slogan and i don't know if people really look at it anymore as okay we want minamadzuin but what does that mean how are we going to make this minamadzuin how are we going to make our education minamadzuin how is that child going to understand that minamadzuin how are they going to live then so to me that's the the thing of nishinaabe education is minamadzuin trying to strive for minamadzuin and then over the next 10 years that's just the thing is you just keep trying learn more and more put it all together more the work i do record different elders talk to different elders write their story out and some of it is teachings some of its life stories some of its jokes but then i also do archival research and i found in the archives a lot of different materials that we actually haven't utilized in our education anymore our chiefs they used to write in Ojibwe our chiefs used to write in our language and people now when i first started talking about this people didn't believe me and they when i started writing different stories that the elders told this was back in the early 2000s i was told a number of different times you shouldn't write that down don't write that down our language was never written they'd say to me and then i was so happy when i found those documents written in Ojibwe back in the 1860s and as early as the 1820s up to 1910 we had a prolific period of writing in an Nishnab Enwin our ancestors Nishnab Ebi Yanwe didn't want the world in their language at that time and they used that to communicate with each other with the pope with the minister of Indian affairs with who they called the Chigamah with each other and so it was a tool and that's what i think we get mixed up with sometimes is that's not that's not the end result we want we want that's just a tool to get more closer to where we want to be with our language by revitalizing it using it in different domains and in different areas of our life and then that reading and writing is here to stay basically in English but i think it should be also in our language that we we do a bit more reading and writing so i found a lot of different historic documents written that still haven't trickled down into universities that let alone elementary schools so this kind of stuff should actually be put into our elementary school programs that they're actually starting the elementary school students should start to look at our compositions of our our story of our history and of geography biology we could do a whole lot of work one of the things that i wanted to do in a science-based manner more methodological manner was to look at all these words of plants and then you actually look at the word of the plant and some of them are just named for how they look some of them are named for their use but there are actually a few of them quite a bit of them that have a suffix that indicate a characteristic and therefore a way of typifying them or categorizing them the way a scientist would in latin so we would we could actually look at those put those all together and then try and deduce why our ancestors named that plant that after that attribute and then why it's the same as this one so for example i'll give you an example we say nakanashk for actual bulrash nakanashk and then we say pakwayashk for a cat tail and then we also chigami washk there's a apparently a different type of species of reed that grows out by lake superior they call that chigami washk there's all in the washk ashk or washk and then those actually the same word weengashk for sweetgrass ashk again is in there so those that ending actually would refer to a plant that grows in swampy or watery conditions so you put all those words together then that's when you start to okay here this is how nishnabe people categorize these different types of plants and then the same thing with you say deminaga wash and that's for strawberry plant that kagamendaga wash same thing for blackberry plant how wash is the ending so you got to look at these put them together how do these fit together what's what was their typification or what was their categorization so there's a lot of work we got to do that we would actually do with these biology plant biology and ecology and then also a lot of words for our geography that we're just I shouldn't say ignoring we just there's just so much work so much damn work that we have to do that we just seem to fight over money that's the sad part about it that I wish we would just actually say okay you guys deliver to devote your energy to making a unit on geography you guys make one on history you guys make one on biology and then make it for grade two grade three grade four but we don't get any coordinated coordinated work out of groups everyone's competing with each other we'd get a lot further ahead if if within the next 10 years if we actually sat down and did that and we actually sat down made a group that says okay you're going to do this one and research it not just not just translate what the white man has written that's what's going on right now I got a thing from the metro Toronto Zoo and they wrote a thing about turtles and frogs and stuff and then they wrote it in English which is fine and then they sent it off to somebody to get translated so that's a literal translation of white man's knowledge about frogs and turtles and then you even have a name for different turtles there that they they didn't even bother to look at what the turtle's name actually is in Anishinaabemowin so they said the western painted turtle and that turtle actually has a name in Anishinaabemowin but these people who translated they just said but that that turtle's name was actually Miskwadesi then they had another I forget the forget the name they put for that blending spotted turtle they made a they said blending I don't think they said this but this is this is an exaggeration blending although she came and blending spotted turtle but actually the word for that the name for that is Boskado they didn't bother doing research they just went ahead and translated the whole thing so we we have to actually have I was actually hoping that Anishinaabemowin would have been an institute to actually pull this all together and they say here's how we're going to go about this these are the critical issues we need to look at these are the issues we need to develop and here's how we're going to go about it we're going to go about it in a coordinated fashion and try and get this all together so that in Lake Huron area because we'll have to do this by dialects that I just see there's too much dialect affinity whatever we make in in Lake Huron area the people out in Kanora aren't going to use it I just I just know that if we make it they might which would be good if they translated to their dialect and insert different words and then it would be of some use we could do it that way as well but sometimes I've just seen people out west they look at it they look down and on our dialect and they put down our dialect because they call us language butchers but there's a lot of stuff that we could share and develop together if we actually sat down and said here's what this is here's here's for this particular this is our unit for geography for grade three this is our unit for geography for grade four grade five grade six all the way up here's our unit for biology all the way up here's our unit for social studies here's our unit for history so we put these all together we'd have one big database and actually I seen a database years ago I don't know if it still exists the Gabriel Dumont Institute had something like this online and it had everything like from making your own Red River wagon to another link in there to actually follow the the trail they had from Red River and then also making your own sash and then different fiddle music different dance steps so you can learn anything and everything about I don't know about everything but anything about the Metis and I thought that should that was what I aspired to try and make was something that was organized about Anishinaabe people that was accessible to all people that people would then come to this well and I gotta go back to this metaphor of the well you go back to it you visit it you find what you want you bring it back out and you actually go home order your school order your home share with it get then you use it up you consume it then you go back to the well you come back again that's the idea is what these recordings of these elders there's always so much information in there that you can use and just even if you just looking at language structure as a language or if you're looking at it as a story or you're looking at it as a philosophical teaching there's different ways to interpret and use these materials that the elders are sharing that they allowed themselves to be recorded so there's still others say the other debate is whether we should be even recording these things and or not making them accessible there's a lot of debate of what should be recorded or can't be recorded in that but I think the the actual amount to teach our students and the the amount to actually give and accord our language and our philosophy and our knowledge it's proper due respect then I think we gotta actually record a bit more and work with it a bit not a bit a lot more there's like I said before there's a lot of work to lot a lot of work to do so much so much work to do that it just astounds me that we're still we're still talking about the seasons and we're still reinventing the units on seasons I feel like we've been doing that for 30 years anyway I just see sometimes I just see what the elders have told me how much they shared and it's just the drop in the bucket what we've been able to make convert into a usable unit to students there's a big bottleneck there and our language studies in different programs are at this point aren't varied enough to actually process all that information that that we want to make into units that actually affect minamadzuan that strive for minamadzuan and then also that accord that nishnabek and dasun it's proper respect and we're not even really at this point implementing what we would call nishnabek kinamage when nishnabek pedagogy so there's a lot of work and lots of work that needs to be done and I know what they tried this I went out to a gathering out in Edmonton and they wanted to make that place a national clearing house at the University of Alberta and everyone including myself said we didn't want that to be the national clearing house we wanted it to be a native organization but we don't have the capacity to do that just to maintain a server to maintain all those recordings to maintain all those files and to keep them organized and to keep building upon them you actually need a lot of human resources and capital resources and just to complete the updates fix the bugs in the software it's a big job so you got to really it's no longer just putting up the vhs in the in a climate controlled environment it's no longer just putting up these recordings audio recordings in a climate controlled room you actually have to maintain that and we need that and I was I wanted to try and situate a place like Ojibwe Culture Foundation as that memory institution but what that place gets so underfunded all our aspirations get stunted by the practicalities of finding enough money sustained adequate funding that we we never get we never get there so I know your question is about other than funding what do we need we actually need a lot of different people who actually have the diligence persistence to sit there and process information like I find I find sometimes that people want just want a quick quick language lesson and and then they're off they and I see this in a sense in a proliferation of programs that are named in our language but then they actually aspire to know what that word means in that particular program that they've made the and the people that implement that program don't really understand what the name means so I think we the language now is shifting into more of a of a symbol of it because it becomes symbolic instead of actually something that you actually implement and and that it actually drives the whole program so I just see that all over that people are willing to use title make a title of their work on this and then they'll expound upon that word that Nishnabe word for two three pages of what it means and then the rest of their paper or essay is is is all in English while the whole papers in English except for that one word and they talk about how deep that word means and what it means and but then they don't actually take it to the next level of what then there's actual it's it's like a ripple it's like concentric circles when you put that in that word then the meanings actually that come after that you're actually supposed to peel back and find more and more meanings of that word the concept it's philosophical meaning it's cultural meaning it's etymological meaning all these different things we don't actually put that all together and let alone do that in Nishnabe Mwen that's what we should be striving for in our university programs but now we're playing we're so far behind we're actually playing ketchup to try and get that far all the stuff that we're talking about like treaties and geography and biology that should actually all be covered as a foundation in our grade school and secondary school in our language and taught in our language as a medium but that is we're not there yet and then when we get to university that's when we can have these deeper philosophical discussions and that's why it's important to record those elders because some of them that really were masters of this are gone now and if some of them I know I know some of them and they didn't allow recordings and I don't know now how to convey what they know and I meet people meet different people who say they've met the same the same teacher I had and they're saying to me contrary stuff that he would say and I'm like I think this guy is just using his name because that old man used to never say that and in fact he would say the opposite but anyway I just think that when we record people then we're we got a real sample and then that actually is going to be what we would then use because right now there's just too much of a bottleneck we got to do this maintenance preservation and enhancement all together at the same time preservation is the easiest thing and that's why I've focused on it but actually it also has a concrete product at the end of it maintenance is something where you're actually maintaining your language and your education and right now like you go to a sweat down here in southern Ontario nine times out of ten you're gonna hear it in in English and I remember one time I went to a sweat and the fella says forgive me grandfather for speaking this language meaning English and then I went back there 10 years later and he's saying the same thing forgive me grandfather for speaking this language and I'm like you had 10 years you you still can't say uh grandfathers in Ojibwe or you can't say forgive me so there's just different things that we we we end up saying language is important but then our actions don't prove that so I I see it ceremony wise I've seen it ceremony wise where we got people that'll say that language is important and then uh but they they haven't really put in an effort to learn a bit more to actually say a bit more so now on the other side though I've actually been to different ceremonies where there's younger people and they're really picking up a lot of language and I've there's this this fella Monty Magaki and Jessica Benson and Squanquot Menominee they're doing really good they're getting somewhere and then the other thing that I I went to new credit Miss Sog is the new credit and this lady she isn't young but she is an old leader I guess she's middle age like me and so she did a little opening prayer in Ojibwe and uh so I thought she spoke Ojibwe so I went up to her and I started yanking away to her and then she says oh no I don't understand what you're saying and uh I was like oh oh wow okay I thought you spoke because you you did this prayer and she says oh that's a I've I wanted to learn how to say that how to do that and she sounded really good she was she was able to do it so some people are serious about it and learning and practicing and and they'll do it even if they're gonna get laughed at and that's the kind of effort we need now for this indigenous education to really take hold in the next 10 years so I think there's actually a lot of materials that are already there one of the things though is it isn't organized there's so much material out there language material stories and stuff it just isn't organized there's there's no plate there's you have these clearing houses uh like uh I think it's called uh Zalgeduin in uh in Nautn Whitefish Lake and it's a clearing house for health information now whether or not that's actually still a useful kind of paradigm or a useful institution in a sense of given the internet because that thing was founded uh I don't know if it was founded in the early 90s late 90s or whatever it was but right now you know we're into databases and stuff and finding stuff online and so you actually if you hit you go on youtube and you hit Ojibwe you're gonna get a lot of hits but what's happening is you don't know you watch those stuff and you hear the the majority of that stuff I did this just for the hell of it three years ago I went on youtube and did that and then I had all these things I don't know how many times I those videos said that lesson one and that's it no lesson two then the other thing then the next thing is colors so you don't have you go on youtube to learn different things but you actually don't have that organized to say okay now you've done this one now go to this one you've done this one now go to this one there's no actual overarching organization to those videos on youtube that you you actually need to be able to sort out which one is right for what you want to learn right for where you are as a learner and then again this comes back again as a learner if you're an independent learner and you're on youtube you're trying to use different information that's when this word again it comes back that I call that we call in our language kinomadwin it's a reflexive thing you're looking for that teaching and that teaching is going to teach you it's a reflexive thing kinomadwin you go on youtube you look for that you find that video with somebody's talking then you take a bit of that in then you think okay now I can go further with this but we need an overarching organizational framework for what all the information that's out there I always wanted to make this thing Merle the late Merle Assent's Beatty made this book called Shkintam Maungidin Doudem what's it called Doudemuk our first family gathering and it was a real beautiful book and it's out of print now but we don't use that in our classrooms that's the thing that we should be using in our classrooms and then Rhonda Hopkins made these nice simple readers and the beautifully illustrated as well the Benjaget Gaumi Jit what the creator given her that's the the thing and it was about life again beautiful beautifully illustrated simple story but complex language and the deep teachings but again those are those are out of print and we we don't use them then we got other stuff that's really dense writing but we don't know how to have kids it's not graded writing for kids and this one's called Bird Talk by Lenore Kijik Tabais another beautifully illustrated book and a good story but the language in there is too too complex for for kids in grade three four or five so we gotta we gotta pare those down a bit or categorize them to actually make them match the learner again to match the learner and where they are at so there's a lot of information there's a bunch of resources and I just think somebody's gotta go through and make a big thing there used to be a website that was pretty good I haven't seen it I haven't been checking it out online in a while and it was this guy I think his name was Rob's Ojibwe language page it was just something like that and he had a bunch of links and he had different commentary and they had a message board I used to go on that message board about 20 years ago and then people would be just asking simple questions and then I was answering and I felt good because I was able to answer then after a while I noticed holy I'm spending a lot of time on this just answering people's mundane questions that you know they should be able to answer themselves and then I started noticing that the actual questions ended up becoming the same so there was a cycle of questions that kept coming back anyway I went back on there about maybe seven years ago I found the site again that I just went through that message board and I was like holy shit these are the same questions that they were asking 20 years ago that things don't really go too far so for that indigenous education what I find is we don't have at this point we've got a bunch of materials that have made and then a lot of these materials just get stored on shelves but we got to actually look and think take an inventory make a critical inventory make an annotated bibliography and actually honestly honestly assess it to say well this actually could be used for grade five if this and this and this were done or this is too complex we got to make this part of the university program or this one would be useful for a program alternative education program so we don't actually have that right now where there's a whole set of Ojibwe language materials that are all there that actually are categorized either as teachings as as an anso con or kinamad vanan or debajamo vanan or games we don't have that we need somebody to get through and put that all together to look at that in that sense