[Music] Lakeland currents your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota closed captioning is made possible by bichi Regional Airport serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis St Paul International Airport more information available at bidi Airport .org welcome to Lakeland currents I'm your host Todd Hogan Our Guest for this edition of Lakeland currents is Anton Troyer he's a professor of a jibway at bidi State University also a noted author and speaker and Tony welcome to Lakeland currents thanks so much for having me nice to have you here today you uh sure have been a busy guy lately it uh you know it you don't have to be any expert on social media and I sure not but I see you on there uh speaking seemingly around the world yes you know I kind of sit on a three-legged stool so one of the legs is really unrelated to my professional work I'm just at the service of our native communities in cultural work everything from naming ceremonies to traditional ojibway funerals and everything in between it's probably a third of my time it's all uncompensated and just in the traditions of our people spent about a third of my time doing my actual job which is Professor of ojibway at piji State University I write books and and so forth and I probably spend about a third of my time um speaking to Native history sovereignty but also issues of tackling tough problems in our world race gender and trying to make the world a better place to me those are like three strands of aaid they all you know intersect with one another and and feed one another boy there's plenty to talk about in this show um but I I wanted to uh start by talking about the ojoy language and and how you teach it and are very well-versed in it um how's that going do you teach uh you teach classes at BSU do you teach classes elsewhere yes so I I teach at bigi State University now all of my classes are taught through something called highflex which means students can attend in person or by zoom and so I've got students from all over the place so I've got high school students taking you know PSO from wamia high school I've got students out at Harvard and Vermont and all kinds of different places and uh it's amazing the the interest in the language ojibway is a big group you know they're probably 600,000 ojibway people on the planet and but we're geographically dispersed across several US states and Canadian provinces and now there's been an effort to really mobilize resources and build programs and things like that I think something that might be a little more obvious to folks we've had a lot of Elders who've passed away uh and every time someone goes if they're taking something with them it's a double tragedy however we've also been starting to do something that really hadn't been happening much since World War II which is making great fluent speakers out of little kids and that's happening not everywhere all at once but where we have really good immersion schools and programs um we're seeing some dramatic success there and you know me working at the University level I do sit on a school board for the world's first ojibway language immersion school but I also do a lot of work developing books tools curriculum resources and training second language Learners of jibway to then populate the immersion schools and programs who are your students generally it sounds like you've you really reach a lot of different age people I do you know there are a lot of things I really love about working at bichi State University for starters most of my students the overwhelming majority are first generation college students everybody who goes across that stage of any racial group or whatever It's A disruption you know to the systemic barriers that people have faced education does help open doors it's a tool in the toolbox doesn't guarantee you an outcome but it's easier to sculpt the outcome with the extra tools and in addition to that I would say for the ojibway language program the overwhelming majority of the students are native students um from Red Lake white Earth and Leech Lake immediately in our area we do have people who come from all over the place um to take language classes so it's still you know a regional University kind of rooted in community which is something that I think is a real strength for our for our particular program um there's probably more to say about what's the future of bidi State University and higher education and what are some of the trends there but I do think it positions us for strength within you know even the tough demographic situation we have there but above all you know my students have gone on to do so many amazing things they they're working in a lot of different language programs um a lot of the tribal leaders throughout ojibway country have come through beiji State University over the years and to see not only the language but the whole indigenous studies program and effort kind of supporting and equipping them for that kind of work is is really heartening so why is it so important for for people uh all people to to learn more about the ajibo language and and learn to speak it oh yes you know I think sometimes there's um an inclination a lot of people might have to say oh well another language that's cool neat or pretty you know another pretty bird singing in the forest and it would be nice to hear all the birds but really what's the value how's it going to get you a job you know those kind of questions and so a couple of things first of all something doesn't have to have economic value to have value I think you can see this and this is beyond even the ojibway experience but we have 7,000 languages spoken on planet Earth 2500 are spoken only by Elders so in the likely lifetime of most of the people watching this show we're going to see a whole bunch of languages go extinct they're even worried about a language like Swedish which is the official language for a whole country and if you publish a book in Swedish they'll put a copy in every library in the country and they're worried about where do they end up a few hundred years from now because everybody in Sweden speaks English it's becoming the this is ironic to say langua franka of business even in Sweden you know and it creates big challenges and and I think you can see this tension I've never met an elder from any group who doesn't shake his or her head and go kidss these days because there's this tension about cultural change and continuity like we want some changes Innovations in health care better longevity standard of living we might have to do make changes to make that happen but at the same time I you can just see it it it seeps into American politics and around the world this fear that like things are changing too fast the world that I know is disappearing that you know I don't know if my kids are going to have a better future or know who they are and that everything's kind of getting smothered by globalization colonization all these sorts of things so among the values for revitalizing a language it does many things it like imagine the experience for people who are not from from northern Europe and you're swimming in the sea of someone else's culture and the only way that you can succeed is to be good at that and you send your kids to school and they're never going to hear about their ancestors who also helped make this world a wonderful beautiful place and it kind of has you at odds with even things that could or should be helpful to and supportive of them and so if we can shift education to be an opportunity for everybody to learn about themselves as well as the rest of the world then it does something positive for them and it doesn't have them at war with themselves or the rest of the world in addition to that the effort for language revitalization pulls Community together and I think as human beings we are hardwired to need connection Community belonging love um you can find this in many different ways honestly even a sports team is a community of sorts in and of itself but this is a form of community that's actually quite healthy um it supports tribal sovereignty it does so many things could share a brief story you know I um a few years ago this is a couple years before the pandemic I was brought to a meeting in maax and for those who don't know malax in central Minnesota just a couple hours away from here is has been a really financially successful um tribe and so for starters they saved half of their money from the first dollar that came through from a casino so now their endowment produces more money than casinos they have a diversified business plan they said why are we sending all our money to a non-native bank they bought the bank and they run a bank they have a diversifi business plan operate businesses even in the Twin Cities uh but then how they spent their money is really interesting too you know they put a fluent speaking Elder in each classroom in the tribal school they created an immersion Nest they put a beautiful ceremonial Hall in each of their communities for their ceremonial drums um and I was brought to this meeting and they said well we have some money and we'd really like to think about Workforce Development but instead of just training everybody to be a great gas station attendant we do need gas station attendants too but um we want to train them for the jobs we really need jobs in language revitalization curriculum development all kinds of things and we'd like to think more expansively about this so I said at that time they had done a language survey and they had identified 25 remaining fluent speakers of oji in their community and they're all over 70 wow I said uh it's not likely that they're all going to go to college get degrees come back and run a new program you're going to have to do something different so I said how about this let's develop Rosetta Stone which is a language learning tool kind of like du lingo or Babel so it can work off of a computer or an app on a phone and you know let's also develop a literacy program where we can develop books in the ojibway language that can feed this effort so we can do literacy in our language with your speakers and as pitching all these ideas and they looked at each other and they said well let's do all of it and so we got to work doing all of it and I mean there's more to say about even the nature of the contract and the details and copyrights we had to sort through all kinds of things I I've done a lot of publishing work so I convinced the Minnesota Historical Society to publish the books in ojibway even though no one on their staff could read them which is a pretty interesting vote of confidence in the effort and you know the the work is really incredible so as we we had to teach Elders how to work through the pandemic by sending a grandchild and a computer to everyone's you know home and sometimes there were all kinds of hilarious stories too about trying to you know acculturate them to computer work we had six of those fluent speakers passed away that was 20% of their fluent speakers during the pandemic when we finally came out of it and could safely celebrate the books and the Rel relase of the new Rosetta stonework and things like that Joe ninab is one of the spiritual leaders there he had lost a brother and a sister to covid and we asked him to speak and he kind of floored me he said you know we we've been through a lot we've been through a lot the past few years we've been through a lot the past few hundred years but I have to say seeing all of these young people coming around seeing what we've been able to build knowing that our elders will be teaching people our language for hundreds of years to to come I have to say that this has been the happiest time of my life and then the maax band of ojibway can turn around and say we hire many many people to work for our tribe native and non-native we expect everybody who works here to demonstrate this level of Competency in our tribal language here's the tool to do it the assessments are built right in you have one year from date of hire Welcome to our Sovereign Nation and so language revitalization is not just a bird in the forest it's sovereignty its economic Vitality its Community cohesion and on a Saturday night when a lot of young people of any group might be looking for fun their ceremonial dance halls are full of hundreds of people who are eating healthy food moving to the music from babies to Elders in their language and culture forging community and it's genuinely healthy what brought you to be interested in the o boy language did did you learn it as a child a bit of both I um you know my father was not native at all he was an Austrian Jewish immigrant and survivor of the Nazi Holocaust um and he has an amazing story of his own my mother grew up in Bea on the Leech Lake reservation and she had to struggle through poverty and so forth her mother had gone to residential boarding school and so there was a break in the intergenerational transmission of our language in my family uh my mother was on a relearning reclaiming reconnecting journey of her own as I was growing up so I did get brought you know to ceremonies and have exposure to things but my my father spoke German and English my mother spoke English in s ojibway and so English was the language of the home and the language at school and I finished high school with a plan to get out of town and never come back and I finished College with a plan to come home and never leave and I ended up um I probably uh upset my parents a little bit I I finished college and I said I'm not going to take a job and I'm also not going to graduate school I'm going to walk the earth and hang out with my elders and they said oh well that's beautiful good luck paying for that because we're done and so I uh I did and I ended up connecting with this guy named Archie MOS who was born in 1901 he was 12 years old the first time he saw a white man M which was an American experience and when I met him he was watching WWF SmackDown on a TV in a little modern house you know laughing really loud but I went in to see him and he just shut off the TV and he said I've been waiting for you I said what how could you be waiting for me you don't know who I am but he had a dream I looked like this person in his dream for him that was enough so I ended up living on his couch and I kind of had a immersion experience in our language and culture I did apply myself you know in all the other ways I was you know I'm probably a little OCD with just about everything I take on it helps me get projects done but I was really dedicated to my language learning work I connected um with Earl who was teaching at beiji State University at the time and um I had a pretty intensive period several years where I was really working hard on it and eventually of course I did have to take a job and eventually I did go to graduate school and I actually got a PhD in history and I I hadn't quite given myself permission to do language instruction yet but I was recording elders and I was transcribing I was doing oral history work and that came into some of my first books were history uh books and then eventually I kind of morphed into a into a language guy today I'm I'm really lucky I don't feel um very narrowly confined like a lot of people who do academic work so I do jibway language work I do history work I do kind of broad General reader type works and I have my first novel out so I I just do what speaks to me and what I think will make a contribution all languages evolve they do yeah how how similar do you think the ajib that you're speaking today is to what was spoken over a hundred years ago Ah that's a great question so languages do change quickly more quickly than most people realize when I went to high school they actually made us try to read Jeffrey choser who is one of the first people to write in English and I could barely read that stuff oh ye Oh yay right and he was only writing 600 years ago and that's English a language widely spoken and widely published in so if you went back a few thousand years ago you'd never understand anybody in England right and it's probably much the same with ojibway where if you go back a few thousand years the language has changed enough where it would be hard to understand one another a hundred years ago probably would understand each other pretty well um but yeah when you're going back some thousands of years that I think you would see quite a bit of change it naturally happens with all languages MH can you tell how different it might have been because thej boy language didn't used to be written down right right so certainly we can tell how different it was you know 150 years ago cuz people were writing things down then um and most of the changes are just lexical expansion to talk about new technologies but the grammar hasn't really shifted so much um but it's a linguistic effort Linguistics is not really language it's the science of language and they can actually you know based upon modeling of how languages around the world have shifted and changed make some good you know guesses about what oji might have sounded like a very long time ago uh which is both you know fascinating to me but also sometimes comical we probably ojibway now is what they call a lot of labials it's towards the front of your mouth like G Waba Min inim you know right up here so probably a couple thousand years ago there was a lot more th sounds probably sounded like people were spitting a lot sure immersion is is a really effective way to learn the language right I mean and that's kind of what you did right I um any you know learning a language takes time A little baby hearing only one language is going to hear a whole year of the language before they say their first word so you need a lot of airtime so immersion does two things that are really helpful for language learning one is you just log more air time instead of taking the time you know in English for example to say here is how you say the word water say you know it's all English in one word right so you'd say to be and you immerse people in the language so they're getting reinforcement with everything you do the other thing sometimes surprises people is that the best predictor of the language somebody will speak is not the language of their parents and it is not the language of their school it is the language of their peers so so this is what happens if somebody immigrates from a country where you know English is not the language of origin to America is the kids will speak their Heritage language with the parents and they start going to school but then they start speaking English with their friends and then when they grow up they're just as likely to marry somebody who doesn't even speak their Heritage language but even if they do they might try to do that language at home but the pure language for their kids becomes English it's really a couple generations and usually the Heritage language starts to break down so what immersion does is it's a little more effective at getting the peer language to be your target language you know I I a late great friend of mine Larry Aken uh from Leech Lake uh tried to teach me some OJ Bo you know I don't remember as much as I should I remember G for cold weather yes appropriate for today yes um but I was just speaking with someone earlier today about the thej language and he said you know I'm hesitant to even attempt some of the things that I see that are written down in a jway because they're very very long words and and I'm pretty sure I'm going to say them wrong um is that uh really I mean they the words look so very long is is that the way they really are spoken or is that the way you think of them when you speak ojibway oh yeah so I mean if you for example take a big text or a speech somebody gives in ojibway and translate it into English they'll be roughly the same length ojibway is just a little bit longer so it's not so much that everything is longer but ojibway is what they call a you know a polysynthetic language so like your word g for example it is cold if you wanted to change things around to say it was cold and English those are all separate words it was c three words in ojibway you're just adding something to the front G and so it keeps building out on both the front and back of words so it looks much longer when you're looking at a single word but really the amount of time it takes to say something is roughly roughly the same yeah so we could do uh several different shows Tony I'm sure um but uh I just you know mainly wanted to talk about the ajibo language you have several books that you've written um some on the history of the the Red Lake tribe and um one that we've done shows before together on called everything you ever wanted to know about Indians but we're afraid to ask um what kinds of reactions do you get from especially that book when you travel around yeah you know that one has been really well received it first came out some years ago um just last year we had a new edition of the book come out cuz so many things had happened and then things just happened since we release the book The pardoning of Leonard Peltier things like that um and so you know it'll be something that we'll probably re up every so often we did a young reader Edition which is taken me in front of a lot of young people and that's been really exciting and heartening for me too and one of the things that I think has really helped that particular book land well is that it's just hard talking about tough topics race politics gender all these sorts of things and I think it strikes a tone that is kind welcoming safe space we're all in this together this isn't about beating people up for all of our history but it's about understanding our history and making things different going forward and I think that tone usually lands pretty well with Native and non-native folks um that you know it shouldn't be just a pat on the back and ignoring all the horrible things that might humans have done to each other but we're going to take an unflinching look at that try to understand it more deeply but really with the spirit of how can we make things different and better and I don't know about you but I'm a native person I grew up getting a sugarcoated version of Chris Columbus in the first Thanksgiving and very little else to more deeply understand this so I think most people feel a little flat-footed around these topics and we all have something to learn and we all have something to teach so I think the tone helps and that it's also accessible you know it's not super academic um and has been useful so yeah so I get lots and lots of questions and they range from searching to hilarious to deep to provocative uh and it's been a lot of fun trying to figure them out I always tell people you know I have a house full of natives I don't even know what they're thinking most of the time I only represent myself a lot of these topics you might have a variety of opinions in the native Community I think you'll find native people who think very differently about any number of things sure um just like white folk will think differently about any number sure that's just the way it goes we have a minute left of our show uh today Tony anything that that you haven't gotten around to that you really wanted to bring up today oh you know the brand new book is called where wolves don't die it's my first work of fiction that was a lot of fun uh working on that and it's off to a great start so I'm I'm really hopeful for where that one will go I've been really excited about some of the support that's been coming through for native language work McKenzie Scott gave $1.5 million to the ojibway immersion school um waduk kading we have a a big Grant uh that went to mean which is a nonprofit organization for ojibway teacher training B miji State University is going to be receiving about a million dollars of that to get in the ojibway teacher training program business there's a lot of really exciting stuff going on I think for anybody listening if you are interested in ojibway language culture history it's pretty easy to find me YouTube channel social media and at bidi State University that's it for this edition of Lakeland CDs thanks for watching