This is a piece from Minnesota Public Radio about a kindergarten through third grade school on the Leech Lake Reservation here in Minnesota that's trying to preserve the Ojibwe language. There is a partial transcript on the web page, some photographs of the school and its students, and a stream of the audio piece.
As a person who has some ancestors whose language is linguistically related to Ojibwe (Algonquin), I think this is wonderful. There is a part of me that wants *some* working knowledge of all of my ancestral languages, but this is problematic because at the moment I can only speak English and German, so I'd have to learn Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Welsh, and Algonquin, Algonquin being the most problematic because it faces the same risk of linguistic extinction as its cousin Ojibwe, and because I as a mostly-white person am aware of the many implications of an outsider being perceived as intruding upon an already marginalized cultural group. I wouldn't know where to begin looking or how to approach the subject without being awkward or rude.
Showing posts with label family history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family history. Show all posts
Saturday, April 12, 2008
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