Newly appointed Order of Canada member works tirelessly to preserve Indigenous languages

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What worries Patricia Ningewance most about the loss of Indigenous languages in Canada is how normalized speaking the English language has become among Indigenous people.

The 70-year-old educator, who was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in December, traces that loss to residential schools, which were funded and operated by the federal government and churches with the purpose, in part, of eradicating Indigenous languages. According to Ms. Ningewance, they succeeded.

“I would say the language has been almost decimated,” she said in a phone interview. “People will say, ‘Oh no, they didn’t succeed’, but they have because nobody under 50, under 40, speaks it very well. We can’t deny that they succeeded.”

Ms. Ningewance has worked tirelessly for decades to preserve not only her own Ojibway language, a dialect of Anishinaabemowin, but other dialects and Indigenous languages through teaching, volunteering and promoting methods of learning that aren’t often valued or funded by institutions.

An assistant professor in the department of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, Ms. Ningewance lives in Winnipeg and comes from Lac Seul First Nation in the Treaty 3 territory of Northwestern Ontario. She has published 14 books in the Anishinaabemowin language that have been translated into Plains Cree, Dene, Inuktutut and Cree – including Ojibway and Oji-Cree pocketbook dictionaries – as well as two books in English.

Her daughter-in-law and nominator for the Order of Canada, Fiona Muldrew, calls Ms. Ningewance a national treasure for the decades of work she has done, including building a community of language protectors and giving hope and pride to thousands of Indigenous people who are connecting to their culture, family and identity through language learning.

“The struggle for Indigenous language reclamation is complex, trauma-ridden, disheartening and poorly funded, yet Pat has worked tirelessly and with joy, love, courage and humour to promote Indigenous languages, not just Anishinaabemowin,” Ms. Muldrew wrote in an email to The Globe and Mail.

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Ms. Ningewance, who comes from the Bear Clan and is named Waabibizhikiikwe, or White Buffalo Woman, was five years old when she attended Pelican Falls Indian Residential School near Lac Seul. That was the worst year of her life, she said, as she was subjected to cruelties of all kinds, including sexual and physical abuse. She then went to Hudson public school near Lac Seul until she was 13 before attending Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie. She spent her summers at home in Ningewance Bay on Lac Seul where Anishinaabemowin was spoken freely and fluently, and her father and uncles chose an alcohol-free life.

She said back then there were no modern devices, and as children they had only their language to play with.

“We would spend hours laughing, making up words. That was our entertainment,” she said.

Ms. Ningewance would later return to Shingwauk as an Ojibway language instructor – the school now operates post-secondary programming – calling it ironic that her office was feet away from where her bed once lay. She felt a sense of triumph for teaching Ojibway in a building where it had been forbidden, much like the triumph she feels in becoming a member of the Order of Canada for a country that tried to eradicate the languages she has dedicated her life to saving.

Ms. Ningewance believes Indigenous communities can reclaim their languages within 50 years by setting goals and establishing properly-funded immersion programs.

“Maybe have Native language sanctuaries, where there’s no English spoken, for people to go and live in the language, to really speak their language as their ancestors did,” she said, adding that her vision includes founding new universities where classes are delivered in the student’s Indigenous language.

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In order for language immersion to be successful, Ms. Ningwance also believes Canada needs more radio, film, and literature originally written and broadcast in Indigenous languages.

“Otherwise, we would just be perpetuating English thought if we translate,” she said.

It’s a method she says worked at a four-week immersion camp in Winnipeg she helped put on last spring, where participants spoke no English and were introduced to the patterns and grammar of Ojibway without any English instruction.

“I had one student who came in who couldn’t pronounce any words at all. At the end of four weeks, she was conversing with everybody else. I was so proud of her, just so proud of her hard work.”

Ms. Ningewance said one of the biggest challenges in language reclamation is the effects of direct and intergenerational trauma that Indigenous learners are experiencing – including herself – because of residential schools.

“It’s emotional, psychological blocks that we have in our throats that prevent us from passing on the language to our children and grandchildren and for students to to learn,” the Ojibway language professor said.

”This is something I see year after year where students have trouble saying a word. It’s almost like a shame. So we need to deal with the emotional block. Non-Indigenous students flourish in my classes because they have no emotional baggage to deal with. But Native students do.”

Ms. Ningewance is organizing a conference for the coming fall that will address traumas and language learning, in part because she doesn’t believe current federally-funded language programs under the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages will work.

She’d rather see the Commission fund languages through radio and film programming, where they could be heard “all day long” before all the fluent speakers like herself die, taking the languages with them.

Ms. Ningewance’s grandson, Aandeg Muldrew, will take her place as a language protector when it’s time. He’s learned the language through her university classes and, at 19 years old, began teaching it himself as a sessional instructor in the same University of Manitoba department where his Gookum works.

She tells other Indigenous language speakers her age that they, too, should find someone to pass their language to.

“Teach someone, teach some family member or someone to take your place in language when you leave,” she said. “So that you leave somebody fluent.”