Saulteaux language festival a success

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When Albert Scott was taken away from his Saulteaux-speaking home as a child to attend residential school, he learned a new language-English-in less than a year. As an adult, he's used his own experience as inspiration, believing that if as a child he could learn English so quickly, why not tap into that same potential among children in his community to teach them Saulteaux?

That's exactly what Scott has been doing since August, 2001, when he took teaching of the Saulteaux language education program at the Kinistin Education Centre, working with students from kindergarten up to Grade 10 to teach them their traditional language.

Students in the program had a chance to demonstrate their Saulteaux language skills during a language festival held at the education centre March 22.

Doug Redl, principal of the Kinistin Education Centre, said he knew the language festival would be a success based on the interest in the event shown by schools in surrounding communities. Joining the Kinistin students at the festival were students from Fishing Lake, Pleasantdale, and Yellow Quill.

With their Saulteaux instructor Scott at the helm of the planning, the two-day event saw over 300 students from the surrounding schools come to visit the Kinistin education centre. With a tipi set up in one corner of the gymnasium for Nanabush storytelling, another corner for dancing and dancing regalia, yet another for a display of beadwork and a mossbag cradleboard, and a series of displays done by different First Nation businesses and post-secondary education institutes, there were a lot of activities for all students to take part in.

"This was the first (language festival) in Saulteaux country, the first one," said Scott. "I feel pretty proud about that."

One of the events held as part of the festival-Saulteaux bingo-caught the attention of some Cree-speaking festival goers-people involved in the Cree language festival held at Muskeg Lake who came to see what the Saulteaux festival had to offer.

"They came over and said, 'We've never seen the Indian language bingo game,' and they said that next year, the Crees are going to steal our idea now. Next year they're going to have a bingo game and call out their numbers in Cree."

The Saulteaux bingo game was a big hit at the festival, Scott said.

"We kind of had to prepare our children to count from one to a hundred and be done it within two weeks. The trick was, we encouraged the non-Natives to sit beside an Indian, but the kids were yelling out the numbers as I called them out in Saulteaux, and they were really good about that, to help out those who didn't know them. We had a couple of false alarms from strangers, but we threatened to throw them out. They weren't supposed to yell 'bingo,' they were supposed to yell 'dutnagin', which means 'I've won' or 'I'm a winner.' So we told them that if they yelled 'bingo,' we're not accepting their card as a winner. That was a lot of fun."

Of course, the real winners in the whole scheme of things are the children, who are learning -in a fun environment-that the Saulteaux language is a part of their culture they can keep alive.

With the success of this year's Saulteaux Language Festival, Scott expects another similar event will be held next year.

"Probably next year, we'll be bigger and better."