Louise Erdrich on the Language
There are many people using and studying the Anishinaabe language in various dialects—Ottawa, Ojibwe, Potawotomi—all around the Great Lakes: Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, even as far down as Oklahoma where some Ottawa have settled. For those of us who are students, it can be very difficult to learn a new language, no matter what that language is-- but we are not alone.
Louise Erdrich, an award winning fiction writer, is a student of the Anishinaabe language. Where she lives in Minnesota, the language is called Ojibwemowin, but it is very similar to our Ottawa, or Anishinaabemowin. In her recent book, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003) she writes about her efforts to learn her traditional language, and about the Elders and people she knows who were forced to abandon their language in boarding schools. Erdrich explains how this has continued to hurt the coming generations who do not get to hear the language. Her reflections may be useful for other students of the language:
"My experience with the language is of course very different. Instead of the language being beaten out of me, I’ve tried for years to acquire it. But how do I go back to a language I never had? I love my first language—why complicate my life with another? I will never have the facility to really use the flexible descriptive power of this language. Still, I love it. The sound comforts me. I feel as though all along this language was waiting for me with kindness. I imagine God hears this language. Perhaps my grandfather’s use of the language penetrated. What the Anishinaabe call the Gizhe Manidoo, the ineffable and compassionate spirit residing in all that lives, is associated for me with the flow of Ojibwemowin...
Ojibwemowin is one of the few surviving languages that evolved to the present here in North America. … [It] is adapted to the land as no other language can possibly be. Its philosophy is bound up in northern earth, lakes, rivers, forests, and plains. Its origins pertain to the animals and their particular habits, to the shades of meaning in the very placement of stones. Many of the names and songs associated with these places were revealed to people in dreams and songs—it is a language that most directly reflects a human involvement with the spirit of the land itself...
I’ve mastered shamefully little of the language. I’m still working on its most basic forms. And yet, as ludicrous as my Ojibwe must sound to a fluent speaker, I have never, ever been greeted with a moment of impatience or laughter. Perhaps people wait until I’ve left the room, but more likely, I think, there is an urgency about attempting to speak the language.
To native speakers…the language is a deeply loved entity. A spirit or an originating genius belongs to each word. Before attempting to speak this language, students petition these spirits with gifts of cloth, tobacco and food. Anyone who attempts Ojibwemowin is engaged in something more than learning tongue twisters. However awkward my nouns, unstable my verbs, however stumbling my delivery, to engage in the language is to engage the spirit of the words. And as the words are everything around us, and all that we are, learning Ojibwemowin is a lifetime pursuit that might be described as living a religion.
Ojibwemowin is a language of action, which makes sense to me. The Anishinaabe have never been all that materialistic, and from the beginning they were always on the move. How many things, nouns, could anyone carry around? Ojibwemowin is also a language of human relationships. Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb there are many forms. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, skwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all of the time. Mookegidaazo describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold. There can be a verb for anything."
Louise Erdrich (2003) Books and Island in Ojibwe Country, pp 82-87