Indigenous Languages

Tânisi! With the help of this book, you can learn to speak Cree! Designed as an introduction for Cree language learners, mâci-nêhiyawêwin: Beginning Cree acts as a self-study aid--a much-needed resource in today's world where few can speak Cree fluently.

Joshua Fishman is perhaps best known and loved for his pioneering and enduirng work in language loyalty and reversing language shift. This volume brings together a selection of his recent writings on these topics and some of his personal perspctives on the field of sociolinguistics, along with an interview dialogue with the editors in which Fishman reflects on his lifetime's work.

An exploration of the uninflected grammatical particles that are ubiquitous among Native speakers of the Ojibwe language and that exist in Ojibwe texts. Ojibwe Discourse Markers is a remarkable study that interprets and describes the Ojibwe language in its broader theoretical concerns in the field of linguistics. With a scholarly and pedagogical introductory chapter and a glossary of technical terms, this book will be useful to instructors and students of Ojibwe as a second language in language revival and maintenance programs.

Told in contemporary Anishinaabe storytelling style, Otter's Journey takes us across the globe to explore how the work in Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization. Indigenous languages and laws need bodies to live in. Learning an endangered language and a suppressed legal system are similar experiences. When we bring language back to life, it becomes a medium for developing human relationships. Likewise, when laws are written on people’s hearts, true revitalization has occurred.

Clarence and his grandmother pick wild blueberries and meet ant, spider, and fox in a beautiful woodland landscape. Text in Cree.

A young seventeenth century Cree woman finds her miskanow - her life's journey - and beginning to develop her gifts for fulfilling that path. Nearly 25 years ago the remains of a Cree woman were found in South Indian Lake — nearly 800 kilometres north of Winnipeg. The body was 350 years old and she was believed to have been around 25-years-old when she died. Now she is helping to preserve the Rocky Cree language. This story is based on the important discovery.