Relationality and Ojibwemowin^† in Forest Walks: Learning from Multimodal Interaction about Land and Language

Abstract

Indigenous language reclamation efforts are pushing academic ideas of what language is, in order to be accountable to Indigenous epistemologies. Simultaneously, as our Indigenous languages grow, we (academics) are pushed to grow beyond the boundaries of disciplines. Categories of “language” and “land” have been segregated by this colonial structure. In this study, as we bring them together, we seek to describe what the ontology in play looks like. We argue that as reclamation efforts successfully grow more young speakers, we are able to push against colonial constructs of learning when we witness learning in the context of movement, land, and intergenerational interactions. In this article, we closely examine episodes from three walks taken from a broader corpus of walks (14), to describe how one Elder walking with groups of two children constructed knowledge and joint meaning-making in the Ojibwe language while walking on Ojibwe lands. We take seriously the idea that there is an Indigenous epistemology at work in these cultural ecologies, one that sees humans as a part of the natural world, at play on the walks. Here we describe specifically what this looks like in the moment-to-moment interactions, and how we read these constellations of cultural practices as an apprenticeship into sustaining relationships with land.

Keywords:

• Indigenous language reclamation
• land-based learning
• micro-interaction

Notes

1 We use “land” to mean all more than human life forms of life found in the sky, water, and land.

2 Forest Walks video collection, American Philosophical Society Library and Museum. https://indigenousguide.amphilsoc.org/

3 We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities in funding “Understanding Learning Mechanisms and Language Acquisition through Intergenerational Conversations in Southwestern Ojibwe, a Native American Language” NSF/DEL award number 1664510.

4 The “we” writing this paper consists of a team of indigenous and allied scholars. Mary Hermes is a Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe community member, has worked in revitalization for 25 years, and is an intermediate speaker of Ojibwe. Mel Engman is an allied white scholar who is an Ojibwe language learner, researcher, and has been involved in the non-profit that was funded to do the original documentation work. James McKenzie is a Diné language revitalizer and scholar and was the research assistant to Hermes at the time of writing. Meixi is a person of indigenous heritage from Thailand, a learning science scholar and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota during this time.

5 ELAN is developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. It is a computer software tool to manually and semi-automatically annotate and transcribe audio or video recordings. It is used by linguists working on endangered languages due to their promise to migrate this software forward.

6 Participants in this research want to be identified by name and place. These are important aspects of who is speaking as connected to the land they are from. Pseudonyms are not used.

7 Can include link to movie in final manuscript

8 “Deictics” are what we call pointer words, they refer to something or someone often with a gesture. We believe they could be significant in the teaching and learning of Ojibwe.

9 “Ecological huddle” use here refers to a face-to-face encounter and the coordination of nuanced interaction that particiapnts use to come to a single focus of attention. It also calls attention to the temporal and spatial arrangement.

10 Can include link to movie in final manuscript

11 Can include link to movie in final manuscript: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hw06kuy0sai-u1IhWWpgE32T05MMvm97

Additional information

Funding

This work is financially supported by the National Science Foundation / National Endowment for the Humanities.