Living Our Language_ Ojibwe Tales & Oral Histories - Anton Treuer [33]
Our Language
[1] Perhaps this Ojibwe language really is being lost. That’s what that one recording I made over there is about. Recently I finished telling about how the Indian is thus losing this thing he was gifted with, to have a language for us to speak—Ojibwe. They’re really losing it; you see this is what I was talking about over there, how they’re losing the names of many villages, rivers, roads, and they’re losing all sorts of things. Nobody knows this any more. They don’t know what those lakes are called, what they’re called in Ojibwe. Kids today only call things by their English names since that’s all they know. Perhaps if someone talked to these children, maybe they would endeavor to do that [speak in Ojibwe].
[2] You see it’s even like that today with bilingual people, when those who speak Ojibwe and English meet one another someplace. As for me, when I meet someone somewhere, if I know he speaks Ojibwe, I speak to him in Ojibwe. You see, when I speak that [language] we end up speaking to one another in Ojibwe. And quite similarly when I see someone somewhere and we start speaking English to one another, the entire time we visit one another we’ll speak English. When the first person to speak starts speaking Ojibwe, then he’ll succeed in having the [entire] conversation in Ojibwe. However, if he doesn’t respond much in Ojibwe when he’s spoken to, that’s it. It doesn’t get used. It’s simple. Today the children think it is easier for them to speak English.
[3] You see I went over there, arriving over there for World War II; when I came back after the war was over, when I heard those children, they weren’t speaking Ojibwe very much. That [included] my companions, my father’s children. We had lost my mother. And those ones, my father had those kids through his [second] marriage. We tried to enable them to speak Ojibwe. And today they all speak Ojibwe, my younger siblings. We spoke Ojibwe to them ourselves. And one who was an older sister to me had gotten married too, so there were different kids. Nobody spoke Ojibwe to them. You see today they hardly speak any Ojibwe, that’s my nieces and nephews. They don’t speak Ojibwe. They know it. They understand. But in spite of this they don’t use it. Perhaps they might feel shy to make some mistake somewhere. They are afraid someone will laugh at them.
[4] Anyhow I want to try to enable the people I taught to speak Ojibwe, which is why I always tell them that. “If someone makes a mistake speaking, don’t laugh at him,” I told them. I also told them, “When you’re being taught, always accompany someone who can oversee you. In that way you will always be conversing,” I told them.
[5] Also today when one person is by himself, he won’t endeavor to want to use it, to speak Ojibwe. When someone is spoken to in Ojibwe, that’s when he will come to an understanding of it. Then at that time he will also make the effort to speak Ojibwe.
[6] You see my stepmother had grandchildren. And as they were raised they didn’t speak Ojibwe. Then my stepmother there who had married my father, my namesake, they took care of them. She was always babysitting, always. She didn’t speak English too well. So she was always speaking Ojibwe to those kids. You see, some time later those kids would thus speak English somewhere. And today they speak Ojibwe when they are spoken to. Talk to people in Ojibwe so that they will speak Ojibwe. When people are spoken to in English, they speak English. That’s how it is when bilingual people speak. These kids should speak. There are probably [only] a couple good speakers.
[7] When someone is enabled to be spoken to, that’s the way he will be able to speak Ojibwe, to understand first. And then he makes an effort when there is nobody there to laugh at him if he makes a mistake. He won’t do that intentionally—make a mistake while speaking something he’s been taught. Today when I hear someone misspeak, sometime later I just tell him what he said there.
[8] You see now my younger siblings, they also speak good Ojibwe. But when they forget