The voice of the land is in our language

Page 18

THE URBANE INDIAN

Not to long ago, I wrote a half-hour television show for Canadian television-all in the Ojibway language. Before you get too congratulatory, understand that while I penned the piece, called The Strange case of Bunny Weequod, it was in English because I wasn't able to script it in my ancestral tongue. That's because I don't speak my mother's language. It is my mother's first language. She thinks and dreams in Ojibway. But I represent part of a growing population of Aboriginals cut off from our verbal roots. Most of my life has been influenced by an English-based media and education system, so as a result, I cannot converse with my mother the way she could with hers. I'm told that when I was younger I was much more fluent, easily straddling the English-Ojibway linguistic fence. I wish I could remember those days.

To add insult to injury, I'm a teller of stories. A contemporary storyteller if you will. In order to sprinkle a little Ojibway into a tale, I have to ask my aunt back home for help. For all my efforts to document the humor and drama of being Native in Canada, something is always missing-the language from which these stories are born.

When I decided to translate Bunny Weequod, I contacted Isadore Toulouse, a fabulous Ojbiway language instructor. First thing to note in this exercise is that Ojibway is inherently a longer language than English. What started as a 25-page script quickly ballooned to 42 pages in translation. Whoever said the Ojibway were a verbose people knew what they were talking about.

When the show aired, I was told by several Ojibway speakers that what was coming from the mouths of the two Cree leads (who had learned their Ojibway phonetically) wasn't the Ojibway of my community but a dialect called Odawa from several hundred miles away-Isadore's home community. I have tried to learn Ojibway, but the opportunities are limited. More money is spent on teaching French than on Aboriginal languages.

There is an old saying in Canada, one I saw on a button pinned to a jean jacket years ago. It said 'The voice of the land is in our language.' I believe that. We sprang from the land and the language (or languages) sprang from us. So what I am offering as an Aboriginal writer who writes in English is a... filtered perspective. It's like asking a person in another room to describe a picture to you, then based on that description, you trying to imagine it and then describing that mental image to yet another person. It's an interpretation of an interpretation. Still, it's my interpretation and I guess that's better than no interpretation.

If I can't speak my mother's tongue, I can at least listen in it. I suffer from what's been called the Dog Syndrome. It goes something like this. You have a cocker spaniel; you tell him to roll over. He hears you; he does what you tell him. But he cannot respond in the language he heard.

My mother tells me in Ojibway to turn the kettle on. I hear her say the words; I understand the words; I turn the kettle on. But I can't respond in the way I understood it. The Dog Syndrome. "Dog" by the way, in Ojibway, is "nemush". Such is the price of colonization. We wear the clothes of our conquerors and sing their songs. As James Joyce put it, "I am forced to write in a conqueror's tongue."

Canada is proud of the fact it has two official languages-French and English. But it's always irked me. I don't remember voting on that. I must have been in the bathroom or something. But these two tongues are merely the most recent and trendy. They've only been on this continent for 500 years, give or take a decade. That's the lifespan of a good-sized tree, 500 years. That's 3,500 in nemush years.

Prior to colonization, it's believed that more than 50 separate languages and dialects were spoken in Canada. A study a few years back predicted that in 20 years or so, only three of these would still be spoken-Cree, Inuktitut, and Ojibway. There are entire generations f Native people who now are alienated from their parents' and grandparents' method of communication. And there will be more.

It's said that when a tribal Elder dies, a library dies with him or her. When an Indigenous language dies, a philosophy dies, a way of thinking. As the first in the long chain not to speak my family's language, this is a burden I carry. I am the first in this inevitable chain to let a priceless language die. I have to live with that. And I feel the guilt.