Ojibwa anthem gives voice to reconciliation

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/01/2020 (1561 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On this night, the heartbeat of hockey in Winnipeg started with a drum, with a pulse thrummed out by the Spirit Sands Singers, and with a song.

It started with an acknowledgment of the land Bell MTS Place sits on, and beyond that, with a familiar melody given new life through a time-honoured tongue.

“A very special national anthem,” Winnipeg Jets play-by-play broadcaster Dennis Beyak called it Friday night, and that’s what it was.

On the ice, the Strong Warrior Girls Anishinaabe Singers took their places. They are students of Riverbend School’s innovative Ojibwa immersion program, just 10 to 12 years old. If they were nervous, looking up at the towering rows of a 15,000-strong crowd, they didn’t show it; they gazed at their teacher, poised and calm.

When they began to sing, they became stars. It was a historic moment, the young choir asked to sing the Canadian anthem in Ojibwa for the tribute night to the Winnipeg Aboriginal Sport Achievement Centre.

It was the first time the Jets have opened a home game in an Indigenous language. There were goosebumps.

It was a striking occasion. It felt like an invitation to a wider conversation, if that carries through. The Strong Warrior Girls were met with an enthusiastic ovation; during an online hockey chat during the game, the response to the overall ceremony was positive.

“Everyone watch this sick drum circle in Winnipeg,” one user wrote, in praise.

Taken at face value, the event is a one-off, or at least, a standalone for the season. Yet, the moment arrives as new pathways are being broken for Indigenous languages to flow through the broader culture; Friday night’s Ojibwa anthem wasn’t the end or the beginning of that process, but it was a joyful waypoint on the road.

Consider just a few of the other connections that have been publicly made, during the last 12 months.

On Sunday, Aboriginal Peoples Television Network will launch the first of six regular-season NHL broadcasts in Plains Cree, the regional Prairie dialect of a language whose homeland spans from the Atlantic shore of Labrador to the heart of Alberta.

That broadcast marks the start of a three-season deal, and comes on the heels of a landmark Cree-language broadcast last year that play-by-play announcer Clarence Iron called his “dream come true.” A Rogers Sportsnet executive later declared it had united the nation.

It goes beyond sports. In January 2019, the city launched its Welcoming Winnipeg initiative to “resolve the absence of Indigenous perspectives, experiences, and contributions,” which could include bringing languages into the names of more places and streets; its first public engagement report came out this week.

Last year, Parks Canada met with community members from the Fox Lake and York Factory First Nations to collect the traditional place names for geographic features in Wapusk National Park. These examples are but a few among many; similar efforts are underway in other locations across Canada.

It will take time, and a lot of understanding, but bringing Indigenous languages back into the spotlight on their territories is a critical act of healing the damage of colonization. It is also a chance to shift the balance of the conversation: English-speakers have spent long enough talking. It is a fine time to listen.

For as long as humans have had words, we have shared them. There are thousands of languages on Earth, and every one is continuously shaped by its contact with others. And the relationships between languages can unfold much like the relationships between peoples: they can be thorny and tense, or joyful and giving.

Consider how English was enriched by these connections. From the Algonquian language family, which includes Ojibwa and Cree, English received words to name things its speakers had never before seen, such as moose, skunk and raccoon. We learned the names of muskeg, squash and opossum.

There was much more English could have learned, if it had only made more space to listen.

At some point in the history of these territories, that sharing stopped. When residential schools beat Indigenous languages out of children, when First Nations people were sequestered on their reserves via the pass system, the Canadian state implemented policies that sought to silence the language.

These policies did great damage, but failed to achieve their aim. Indigenous languages still echo on the land where they were born. And every language is a world unto its own, beautifully suited to the culture that holds it and the environment to which it belongs; to learn an Indigenous language is to learn how deep these links run.

So if there is to be reconciliation between the people who call Manitoba home, language must be a part of that conversation. The invitation is there to engage it, and Friday night, it began with a drumbeat, and a familiar song.

It won’t end there. But through the eager voices of the Strong Warrior Girls, through their bright eyes and moment of pride in a hockey spotlight, we saw a bit more of what our community could sound like, when the paths are open to show the full scope and history of it to ourselves and the world.

It sounded like the national anthem, yes. But also, a little like hope.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca