 Okay, my name's Solomon Rath, and I'm originally from Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan, and I started university here in 1973 with H, and as a student, then I started working for SISC in 1984 as a section lecturer, and came on full-time in 1986, and I've been on here since as a new instructor. And throughout those years, we've run into leg-up and teaching Cree, and we've had to make our own resources as we went through the years, because there was nothing to work with when we started. There was no textbook to work with, and my mentor and friend, Jane Okimazes, wrote a book, Cree Language in the Plains, which we were able to use in introductory classes, and I contributed to the workbook on that because of the exercises that I was doing, so she put me in there as part of a co-author for that one, and then she went back and re-edited her textbook and got my name off there, which is a good thing, you know, because it's her work. And so we've had to develop materials all along, and I've been doing the senior level classes in Cree all these years, and as such, I've had to create my own materials. And the outcome of that work is this, which Cree stories, Nehila Pachimuna, which Cree stories, and what it is, it begins with a traditional story of, we sat each other on the starters just to show what lessons there are in stories, traditional stories, so like the starters story tells you the sacredness of names, and how you protect your names away from strangers, otherwise something bad will happen. So that's what it is. And the rest of the stories are a series of, it's a collection of stories that I wrote for classes, like Cree two or two, Cree two or three, the intermediate level classes and the senior level classes. I've had to develop materials for those things so we students could work with them. So that's what the outcome of this book. Basically, we had to create materials for our language classes. And in the introductory classes, we've had this book, Matinahia Wewin. And this is an introductory Cree book for introductory Cree, of course, Cree 100, Cree 101. And it's a series of grammar explanations and exercises to help with the retention of the Cree language. And that was published in two years ago, I think, or four years ago, and it was old. This is used here at the university. And it's also used in other universities, as it turns out. This was in 2016, 2014. So Matinahia Wewin and supplements Gino Gamassis' book, Language of Plains, in a way. And so, I guess we need language materials at all times. We create materials in the order of the wheel behind you. That's for language retention, we call it Cree wheel. And you spin the wheel like that. And it comes to a topic, and then you ask questions about that topic with students. And everything's prepared. But the other thing we do is also, I myself, do a lot of translation for other words, for other people. Rosanna Deerchild published a book called Calling Down the Sky. It's a book of poetry about residential schools. Her mother's experience in residential schools. And so she published it in 2015. And then I met her in Winnipeg with a friend of mine. And her friend introduced me to her. And her friend said, Solomon, it's a person to talk to you about translating your Calling Down the Sky into Cree. So what we did is we published Calling Down the Sky in Cree, the translation's in Cree, of all the poems that are there. Another thing we do is also help upcoming scholars in the field wanting to write. We get a lot of people wanting to do stuff in Cree. But they also want to write in Cree standard, Roman orthography, the way we write here in Cree, the way we encourage people to write. And one of the things that came up last year was a 16-year-old writing a book, a poem about bullying. So she wrote a poem in English and her mother asked me to translate into Cree. So we have this. This is the outcome of it. Her friend did the audio, the illustrations. Keshige Moto in it, a secret. And from one friend to another, I'll say it's a secret no one can tell. And it goes on and on and on. That's her. So she's 17 now, so she's got this going. And she reads in public, the English part anyway. She's not a Cree speaker. Her mother's a Cree speaker. So helping along on her way to publishing. So we encourage young people to do stuff in Cree and help them to go along with that stuff. So those are the kind of things we do. And here we have another book, Plain Cree English Edition, which I was helped in editing. And this is really neat because it was really stolen words. Colleagues of mine is asking June, did the translations. They are fluent speakers. But most fluent speakers can't write properly in SRO. So what I got recruited to go ahead and do some edits on this for the correct spelling for stolen words. So we do that kind of stuff to help promote literacy. Our site and Cree Literacy Network, we have a lot of stuff going in there. And so this is so wonderful to see. Because when I started here, there was nothing available. And so my heartfelt words of happiness is another one that we did. I was helpful with editing. People ask us to do stuff. We'll do it. Growing up, we had no access to indigenous literature as such. Great for, I ran into the site. I learned how to read by that time. I read English and stuff. And I ran to this Indian Legends of Canada by electric. And I thought, wow, great. Let me have a look at this. So I had a look at it. And I saw a story here about, you know, Cree story about the flood. And I read it. And I said, that's not the same version that I remember my mother telling me before we're going to register at just school. So different, you know. But I was happy to find stories about the kind of stories I grew up with. And so that prompted my interest in doing my studies in literature and ended up having a degree in English literature. And meanwhile, educators were out there collecting books, collecting stories like these things. SICC came into being in 1973 and started producing materials in Cree and Dene and Nakoda and Nakoda and Nakoda. And so we have eight Cree legends, which sort of offset this. It was really nice. And of course, Cree legends, we sacchage our stories, and problem. They're all in English. Cree legends. And so they're all in English. So and it was like that for the longest time. Everything you found about Cree legends was English. And then comes along a wonderful woman called Frida Henichu. I met her with a talent over there, of course, in her work. And she was collecting stuff like this, going back to collecting traditional Indian stories and Cree stories in Cree. And so we had Frida Henichu, Gina Kamas is doing stuff in Cree. And I was writing along the short tales as I go along and saw what they did. So Frida has a few publications in Cree. Quite an extensive collection of Cree textbooks and stuff. So Frida Henichu is just wonderful doing that stuff. So we have this situation. We have a lot of people starting to write Cree. A lot of people today are really hesitant to write Cree because they're scared that they might misspell a word or something like that. That's where we came in. We offer our service. If somebody wants to write Cree and asks us to edit, we do edit. We do the editing. And most of the time it's for free, which is good. And so these are resources required by practically everybody who's teaching the language all across Canada. And resources are there. Because we still have teachers wanting to know, where can we get resources for our language classes? And I have to refer them to SICC and their publications. They have an extensive collection of language teaching materials. And that's what their job is within our government system to provide materials for language teachers and teachers in general. And strangely enough, though I found a reluctance of teachers to use their resources for some strange reason. I can't tell you why. But other than SICC, going and do stuff, do these stuff. We've lost Frida. She's gone on to the spirit world a few years ago. So there's had to be some of the others that comes in to do their stuff. Her daughters are doing this stuff, edit with that stuff, which is good. But they're not fluent like she was. We've got to edit their materials, a lot of stuff. But people are always wanting stories of materials. My main focus is stories themselves, the traditional stories. Because I find that the traditional stories is where we had our education system. That was our university basically. Because the stories taught us lessons on how to be in this world, how to live in this world, and how to treat one another. And so I concentrate on that. And I teach two classes on that. One class is called I-N-D-L-2-4-1. It's Cree Literature in Translation. And so we look at the collected works of our stories by ethnologists and ethnographers and all that stuff. And anthropologists, they've collected stories in English, most of them in English. Only one that I know of collected them in Cree. And that's Leonard Bloomfield. And Leonard Bloomfield has two collections, Sacred Stories of the Street Grounds Cree and Plains Cree Texts. And what he's done is he's collected these stories in Cree and in English, with English translations. And we're just really a really wonderful resource and a lot of people don't know how to read the Cree though. Okay, so we have, then when those cartridges came home, what happened to their children? Something's missing. What's missing? So if you know how to read Cree, you go over there, read the Cree part. That missing piece is in the Cree part. All the dirty pieces are now translated into Cree. But they're all in English. They're there in English. So it's a valuable resource. And if you know how to read this thing, then you're okay with that. He's got two of these things. So that was good to find. So he did this in 1931, 1925, is when he did his fieldwork and he publishes in 1931, I believe. So this has been around for that long, in 1930, in English and Cree. But it's just been sitting in the library and nobody's been using it. But we use it a lot. And what's happening is we have this kind of stuff coming into play, Bernice Johnson and Miriam Kroner doing this stuff. A calendar of all things. It's really good. And of course, those of us who do the language thing were asked to contribute to this by editing stuff, which we did, which is really good. So that's really good. Now here, when we have sled dogs, it's another Cree English thing, English Cree thing by Miriam again. Whenever Miriam is doing projects, she'll ask her colleagues to please edit her work so we could get the right spelling for that stuff. So that's happening. A lot of people who are doing publications are asking people who know how to write their language properly to do the edits in their books. It's so essential. Because I imagine myself when I was a kid, I wanted some materials in Cree and there was nothing there. We had this, but I didn't have this in elementary school. I didn't run into this until I was in the university. But now kids in elementary school and high school will have access to these things. They do have access to these in the library. And that is what is so different today is that there are materials available there and people are looking for them. So all of us speak Cree. And not all of us speak English properly either. So it's really unique because Cree is our first language. We struggle with English. And they'll tell stories. My cousins would tell stories and my brother and sister would tell stories. And if they want to write them out, they'll try to write them out, but they'll get me to edit for the correct spelling. And I know our band, a huge trot. Look at this. I think the names here are talking about my family. So we have my cousin Ida Ratt doing the story. And my cousin James Ratt illustrating the story. And then we have this. This is fairly new. They just put this out last year. Is this teaching what it's called? Yeah, that's it. And this is the flashcards that come with it. With that teaching for languages. SICC put that together. And I'm bragging here because the author, not the author, but the artist who built this is my granddaughter. So there's a lot of stuff that's been happening over the years and it's good to see. You know, like I'm ready to retire in a year or so and it's good to see that people are picking up interest. And you know, like when I came into this field, there was nothing. Now there's lots of work going on and I could retire, go to the mountains and just not worry about anything. A lot of people are getting more and more interested in our traditional stories. They're realizing our traditional stories are not just there for amusement. They're there to educate us. You know, they're just not a little fairy story. It's for amusement for the children. They are there to educate the whole system, the whole people about life, how to be in life. So a lot more people are getting interested in these stories and I'm really happy about that. We have to retain our languages. It's one of the first things. We have to keep our languages alive. We have to get our stories out there so we can keep our culture alive because our culture has our stories. The culture is in our stories. We have to bring those things alive again and to make sure that the Latin Cree language survives. So we provide language materials for that kind of stuff. A lot of people think that because Cree was never originally language we shouldn't be writing. But the way I look at it is more and more people are losing the language and a lot of people are on their own in this world. They don't live in a society like we used to back in the old days where everybody's around, circling in a teepee, right? They're all the same together. Most of us are isolated and if you want to learn something you have to do it on your own. And if you have no resources there's no way you can learn something unless you have resources. So we provide resources by book, hard copy books or by doing things online. Like we have Cree Literacy Network going online. We have things like this happening in the Cree Literacy Network. Things like that in the Cree Literacy Network. And we'll have it like that as a hard copy and we'll also include the audio for that. Like, let's keep on speaking Cree. Let's keep on speaking Cree. In our language it's our Cree Essence. So we have that situation. That's the same thing there. So we put that online for people to access it. And I posted it on Facebook earlier and somebody said, can I have a PDF copy of that please? So I sent them this PDF copy of that stuff. I also run a page on Facebook called Cree Language Videos where I post videos of language teaching and also the traditional stories that we have. The top student is a non-Indigenous person. And I was at a language festival three, two years ago. And we told stories. I had my sister and I and my nephew. We told stories, traditional stories. And we asked if anybody else wanted to tell stories. And my student, who's a non-Indigenous, I volunteered and he ended up telling two stories in Cree, all in Cree. He had memorized taking his stuff from this book. And he was really very good at what he was doing. He memorized it. He told the stories really well. And my sister and my cousin just looked at me. And he said, you're a student? Yes, he's my student. He's doing this on his own. And I said, basically I just taught him Cree 101. He took off from there to learn on his own. As I said earlier, if you want to learn, there's nothing stopping you from learning. If resources are there to be able to do that, he wouldn't have been able to do that 30 years ago because they were hardly any resources at that time. But there's not resources there today. A person can do that, but he did. It's a touchy issue for a lot of people. For me, I don't see anything wrong with it. Because most of the people who do that are really respectful of Cree traditions and Cree ways. They'll be respectful of the protocols that are involved in that. So with that in mind, there's nothing wrong with it. And it also shows that anybody could do it if they put their mind to it. You know, like my student there, he can actually do a story in Cree. You can also go in and teach basic Cree stuff on his own. And he got criticized by somebody about appropriation and stuff. And I told that person, instead of complaining about appropriation, why don't you ask him how he does it so you can do it yourself? Just shut her up. That's my perspective. Anybody could do it. If this guy could do it, I'm only how can do it, then any Cree person can do it. It all depends on your commitment and how committed you are. How much time are you willing to spend in your field? And it's just like Frida Hennekew, if she had not been so committed in saving the language, her publications wouldn't be out there. And there's a lot of publications as she did. And you could look into Cree, even look into Cree language videos, nothing. The other one. Cree Literacy Network. Go in there and look for Frida Hennekew. I'm trying to do a search on Frida Hennekew. And my colleague Arden has listed all the stuff that Frida Hennekew has done for you to see what kind of work she's done. And somebody has to do that to provide that material. Because we need that material because that's basically all anybody has for resources. They can't go leave this room here and go start talking language right around us. They can't leave a classroom, a Cree language classroom, and go into a Cree speaking community. That's just not possible right now. But they can leave the classroom after getting some instruction on grammar and how to pronounce words, go home and do their own work and come out and say, I'd like to tell you a story Solomon, but it'll be in Cree. Hey, let's hear it. That can be them. It can happen. That's why I think resources are so essential to work on. I've been lucky in my life. I've had people who have encouraged me to do my work. And things like, people like Jean-Auguin Masses and Stan Cuthand, the late Stan Cuthand, and the late Ahab Spence. And Ahab Spence told me, if you want to work in this field, be prepared to stand alone. Because people are going to try to tear you down, try to discourage you from writing a little language. It's going to be like that. And this is what he told me back in the eighties. And this is what I found. This is what Lynn is talking about forever, trying to tear it down and work for what we do. But we must persist. My mentor has told me, keep going, keep doing what you're doing. Both Stan and Ahab told me to just keep on doing what they're also Jean tells me to just keep on doing. Because people are going to say, we don't write our language. We shouldn't be writing our language. It's not the Creeway. I tell them we shouldn't drive our cars. It's not the Creeway. We shouldn't ride the airplanes. It's not the Creeway. That was a silent swear word, by the way. But this is the attitude that we're facing with people that are telling us we shouldn't write Cree, because it's not the Creeway. But I tell them, okay, fine. Get rid of your cars. Get rid of everything that is convenient for you to survive in this world. In this day and age we need to be able to write our language so we can make sure that our language is there for the next generation. And make sure that the stories are there for the next generation. Especially when you look at the stories that have been collected in the past. A lot of the stories have been really messed up because the people who spoke the language weren't, people who were collected them didn't speak the language. So they really didn't know what was going on behind the stories. So we need people who speak the language to know another story, to bring those stories back. Because those stories have the culture that we need to learn. And if they're both written in English and in Cree, so much is better. So it's nice to see what Frida had done with her stuff. It's nice to see other publications. Like people wanted to write Cree, their poems into Cree. Like this stuff here. It's nice to see that. And I encourage that kind of stuff. And there's more and more being done. And I think that it's shifting around rather than people saying we shouldn't be writing Cree. They're saying let's write Cree but let's do it properly. You know, it's just really neat where we come in. And so things are looking up in that way. And I mean the 17-year-old doing this, wanting to do this in Cree, I think that was a real good thing. You know, like Jewel Charles doing this stuff and wanting to do it in Cree, I think that's a really good sign that students are wanting to learn, wanting to write. You know, so there is hope. It's been discouraging a lot of times, but there is hope. There's Cree language sources. Cree language sources is another page. And Cree morphology is a wonderful page. And so there's all the Cree speakers who are teaching out there are doing stuff like this online. There's lots of help online to be able to do this. Even the dictionaries are online. New instructors that are coming in. They need people to guide them. They need mentors to keep on teaching. Like I had mentors all the way through. And I've seen, I've been teaching since the mid-eighties, and I have seen teachers come and teachers go. Because the teachers who are teaching in the schools get discouraged because they meet with opposition like Lynn was talking about. They meet with that kind of opposition. So they give up and move on to something else. You know, so they have to keep at it and understand that they're going to be running into problems at all times. But it's worth staying put to do what you need to do. And you are going to, no matter what you do, no matter where you go, you're going to meet with opposition. And so if they could find somebody who could mentor them all, say, begin teaching, that is wonderful. And it's the only way I survived. Otherwise I wouldn't have kept on going at these three people not encouraged me to do so. The increase also is we have different dialects. And a T-H speaker working in Y dialect. So I get black from Y speakers telling me I shouldn't be teaching Y dialect. And I get black from T-H speakers, I shouldn't be teaching them. I have these publications and I'm matching them here and there. This isn't a Y dialect. It's just what we teach here. So I had to be in the Y dialect. So I had to put that in a T-H dialect. And we're the other one that I have in there. There's three languages to it. We're the bottom. So this publication is in the Y dialect. This publication is in the T-H dialect. So I get black. Predominant materials are in the Y dialect. And when I'm asking to do things, I ask, what do you want? Which style do you want? You increase the language literacy. What we've been doing there lately is we've been putting both T-H and Y dialect stuff up the same thing. And so we predicted that in the last couple of years and it's been really effective. If we could do that, great. More and more people are interested in publishing stuff in the language. In all languages, not just Cree. You know, like I've seen in the Code of Publications this year. And the Code of Text came out in this year. And we see some solo publications. Lynn's text post is going to come out this year. Or maybe next year. It depends on the publisher. So that will be the Code of Stuff coming into play. So there's more and more stuff in the languages that are coming out. And it's good to see. That was 1979 or some of that. And we had something like this. And Intense, of course, in Cree. This was the only Cree available stuff coming into play. And we had stuff like this. Her husband was mad at her. So she hit him up to the head of the crying pan. So Jean looked at this. I'm going to write my own text book. This book is very heavily Christian-oriented and very misogynistic in a lot of ways. So Jean, who came out, says he went ahead and wrote Cree Language Other Plains to offset this. As soon as I was written, we threw this out. But I still keep it round for a good laugh. That's it. Of the language materials in all these years. That's just wonderful. It's like in 1973 in the area of language publication. It was nothing. Hardly anything there. In 1973, half-breed came out. Right. And if you look at Indigenous publications, prior to 1973, you'll see that it's very dry. Very dry spell. After 1973, more and more and more came out. If you were in 2020, it's all this stuff. You wouldn't be able to see this in Cree. Most of them are in Cree.