Giving new life to her native language, Ojibwe

CHICAGO — When Dorene Wiese was a young girl she would listen to the stories her family members told as they gathered around her kitchen table.

Relatives often reminisced about harvesting rice, or more precisely manomin, from the marshes of northern Minnesota. They told stories of getting into canoes and using hand paddles to knock the grains into their baskets. It was an annual event, filled with ceremony that brought their Ojibwe community together as they worked to parch, separate and clean the rice, before bagging it for storage.

Wiese (pronounced WEE-see), who's now 60 and is the president of the American Indian Association of Illinois, said that although the stories were robust — as a child she easily lost herself in them — she realized years later that because her family no longer spoke the Ojibwe language, their stories may have lost meaning and color by being told in English.

So Wiese, who has a doctorate from Northern Illinois University, has been working for the last three decades to revive the language. Her research is in oral history, and she has studied the ways in which learning is passed down through generations.

Revival is necessary, she believes, because for so many years, native languages withered for various reasons. Among them is that generations of Native American parents stopped speaking in their native tongues, believing their children needed a mastery of English to succeed economically.

In addition, Native-American children who were taken from their homes and placed in boarding schools from the late 1800s to about the 1940s were punished for speaking anything other than English.

"But language is the thread that keeps culture together," said Wiese. "Language is woven into our brains and psyches and memories. Today when we say the word "medicine" in English, we think Walgreens. But in Ojibwe, the word is "midewin" (pronounced ma-DAY-win), meaning 'from the earth.' It's the healing that takes place directly from mother earth.

"That seems like a minor detail, a definition of a word, but when you look at how it means that medicine isn't just something from a pill or a bottle but from a cornucopia of plants from the Creator, it makes a difference in the way you see it, feel it and remember it."

Reviving the Ojibwe language hasn't been an easy undertaking. Wiese said that there are 60 tribes and bands of Ojibwe people throughout the United States and Canada. The language also was mostly not written down, and the dialects along with word usage and meanings vary depending on geographical areas.