Waasechibiiwaabikoonsing Nd’anami’aami, “Praying through a Wired Window”: Using Technology to Teach Anishinaabemowin

Imagine a trickster on life support, a mythic, transformative being made up of equal parts humanity and the unknown, wired, tired, and waiting . . . on the edge of life. This is the language of Anishinaabemowin today. Because the patient is a trickster, we don’t know yet if we are witness to a death or magnificent birth. So we watch the monitors, we try new medicines, we form a network of prayers: Prayers made of wire, glass, and light. Prayers made of digital, full-spectrum sound waves. Prayers of stories recorded in color and contrast that is fed through lenses and transformed into a binary code of bezhig (1), kaa gego (0), bezhig (1), kaa gego (0). Prayers hosted on servers and posted in clouds of computing. Prayers of work and prayers of play. Prayers of convergence, continuance, and collaboration. Prayers that connect the orality of the ancestors to the appjumping multiplayer community yet to come. Teaching an endangered language today requires extreme measures, and there is no guarantee of success. But the situation is dire and demands adaptive, creative survivance.

Anishinaabemowin is one of twenty-seven Algonquian languages, the ancestral birthright of more than two hundred communities in the United States and Canada. Now used as a single term to refer to several closely related dialects, Anishinaabemowin is the language of the Three Fires Confederacy Tribes, the Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe. Approximately 80 percent of its speakers are over sixty, and no one learns Anishinaabemowin as a first or only language anymore. Many understand that the language is dying, but first attempts at resuscitation were local, oral, and often without historical and political context. The first lesson needs to be a history. In a 2009 essay on language revitalization, I noted that we must acknowledge why the language was lost if we are to face honestly the challenge of bringing it back (Noori 20). It is simply not enough to preserve linguistic artifacts as one facet of identity. To properly care for a living language, we must understand the trajectory of decline and recognize its position in the present era.

A quick review of translation relations shows how the position of Native languages has shifted from one of necessary understanding to erasure and replacement. Algonquian colonization began as early as 1650, when the French traders and Jesuits arrived in what became known as the “pays d’en haut,” the largely Algonquian world west of the Iroquois nations (White 24). In order to possess furs and souls, the immigrants arriving were forced to learn the language of the natives. However, as immigration continued and warfare raged, the tables were turned. By 1776 more than five hundred distinct Native nations were described, in English, in the Declaration of Independence, merely as “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction.” It is interesting to note that at the time the lingua franca of politics was French. Yet the linguistic hubris of the young nation was evident, as John Adams predicted in 1780: “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age” (qtd. in Armitage 71). The need and desire to speak the language of the natives had dwindled. It is essential to see language as yet another colonial commodity sacrificed to hierarchical goals of dominance. Linguistic diversity was in no way desired by the young nation being formed and had not been desired for many centuries in the countries from which it fought for independence.

As the United States grew in land base, treasury, and military power, it also grew in linguistic dominance. Although Native Americans were granted citizenship in 1924, and the right to govern themselves in 1936, these rights were offered in English. As hideous as the erasure of culture and community through the slave trade, as thorough as Hitler’s ethnic cleansing, America’s relationship with Native Americans is one of denial and restriction of identity through numerous tactics intended to...