
A Bemidji professor is on a quest to keep the Ojibwe language alive - allthings
https://www.startribune.com/a-bemidji-professor-is-on-quest-to-keep-the-ojibwe-language-alive/569281272/
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nkurz
1) I was unable to get past the popups to read the article until I tried
opening the link in a "private" window. If you are having trouble, that might
work for you as well. Alternatively:
[https://archive.is/DUdqz](https://archive.is/DUdqz).

2) Growing up in Northern Wisconsin, the only public radio station we reliably
received was from the Ojibwe reservation
([https://www.wojb.org](https://www.wojb.org)) and featured a segment called
"Ojibwe word of the day". I thought I'd remembered the word for "moon", but
checking the wonderful online Ojibwe dictionary at UMN
([https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu](https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu)), I think I must be
mistaken --- or maybe there are multiple words for moon.

3) Anton Treuer (the subject of the article) teaches at Bemidji State, while
his brother David teaches at USC. David's 2013 book "Rez Life: An Indian's
Journey Through Reservation Life" is an accessible and I think accurate
introduction to the complexity of life on modern reservations
([https://www.amazon.com/Rez-Life-Indians-Journey-
Reservation/...](https://www.amazon.com/Rez-Life-Indians-Journey-
Reservation/dp/0802120822j)).

~~~
justusthane
Crazy, WOJB was also one of my home radio stations (although being close to
Ashland we got others as well). My dad DJd occasionally on WOJB when I was
really little.

~~~
2snakes
My stepmom was a program director too! I still tune in sometimes.

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CoolGuySteve
The part of Northern Ontario where I grew up is part of the Ojibwe nation.

The most impressive thing about the nation to me is how inhospitable the
region is. The winter where I'm from typically lasts about 8 months, it snowed
a few days ago. The area wasn't really permanently inhabited by white people
until well after industrialization.

I couldn't imagine living there without shipping or heating infrastructure.

It's unfortunate that we've lost so much of the history and traditions that
enabled the Ojibwe to thrive there. Public school definitely didn't help, we
learned absolutely nothing about their culture despite maybe a quarter of my
class being native kids.

~~~
jcranmer
> Public school definitely didn't help, we learned absolutely nothing about
> their culture despite maybe a quarter of my class being native kids.

The one thing that always grated me when learning history in school is how
utterly Eurocentric it was. Early anthropology was focused on explaining how
"we" (principally Victorian Britain) became so great, and looked at the world
through a lens of a checklist of how evolved they were--and people who
couldn't smelt bronze were not seen as far advanced, since that's one of the
first items in the list. While this view has been thoroughly discredited
within the field of anthropology itself, it still lives on in popular writings
and (sadly) our history textbooks.

Which is a shame, because the more you study pre-Columbian Americas, the more
amazing you find it is. There's plenty to challenge your preconceived notions
of history.

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lopmotr
Is there any evidence of this common claim that obscure languages "may contain
some of the most critical solutions to the problems we face as humans"? What
kind of problems is he talking about there? Has it ever happened before?

So what that a monkey is a "lice hunter"? In English, an anteater is an
anteater and a wood splitter is a wood splitter. It's not a very special way
of naming things. Maybe this language has no value to anyone except its own
users, but they already speak it, so no effort is needed.

These activists always have a dark intention in their ideas that they want
some poor indigenous people to be burdened with the work of learning and using
a dying language. If young Ojibwe people are choosing not to use it, then
maybe it's because they don't want or need it. I also didn't learn much Morse
code as a kid despite older people wanting me to. Turns out it's no longer as
useful as it was back in their day.

"Language, Treuer says, defines nations, connects generations and allows a
culture to express its perspective on the world." Yes, and English does that
job much better because you can actually communicate with the world and
multiple generations. Different cultures do alter it with local slang or
styles of speech and it's still intelligible while also defining their
identity.

~~~
ivanbakel
>Yes, and English does that job much better because you can actually
communicate with the world and multiple generations.

That's a misunderstanding of Treuer's point. English is able to define
_English_ nations and express the _English_ cultural perspective. He's not
arguing that language, generally, is a tool for communication - he's saying
that specific languages each yield their own specific identities.

To address the point more generally - languages do, for most speakers, have an
influence on thought. People acknowledge that effect to varying degrees, from
"you can't think what you can't express" to "language is intertwined with
culture and culture differentiates thought" (i.e. not quite Sapir-Worf).

As an anecdotal argument - monolingual speakers often expect translation to be
one-to-one, bar idioms. The fact is languages differ in nuance for different
kinds of terms, to the point where a mapping might be one-to-many, many-to-
one, or completely absent - and those nuances can and do reflect different
cultural attitudes. For example, there is no English equivalent to wel[1], the
Dutch word for reinforcing a positive sentiment.

[1]:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wel#Dutch](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wel#Dutch)

~~~
jl6
This is a sidetrack, but is “wel” like “do”, as per the examples on
Wiktionary? Or simply like the English word “well”?

~~~
ivanbakel
"wel" is basically nothing like the English "well", except in archaic speech.
It is _similar_ to "do", but you can't use "do" to positively affirm nearly as
much as you could use "wel". There is simply no way to directly translate it,
and it has no equivalent in English - though you can describe it, as the
positive "not".

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DoofusOfDeath
I'm struck by how many of them have seemingly ethnic-Japanese facial features.

~~~
oehtXRwMkIs
Bering Strait

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
I figured. I just find it super cool to see contemporary signs of something so
far back in history.

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LatteLazy
Learning English or Chinese or C# would vastly improve people lives. Learning
Ojibwe is less useful than learning klingon...

