The Near North District School Board (NNDSB) is offering online Ojibwe language courses for students throughout Ontario.
It’s the first board to so, the NNDSB mentioned in a release, and the lessons will be available to students throughout the 56 school boards in the province which are members of the Ontario eLearning Consortium. The courses will count as curriculum credits, as well.
Sarah Spence, the board’s principal of student achievement and well-being, said, “At NNDSB, we recognize the importance of Indigenous language revitalization and preservation, in fulfilling the Calls to Action related to language and in forwarding Truth and Reconciliation.”
Falcon McLeod will teach the online Ojibwe language courses. The board noted in a release that, “He sought out every opportunity available to study Ojibwe while in school and studied with many notable language instructors along the way.”
However, “The real turning point in his language education came when he attended his first immersion camp Ojibwemotaadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminaang (OOG) in Cloquet, Minnesota,” the board’s release continued.
McLeod elaborated, “Ever since that experience, I have been slowly trying to emulate all those experiences in my home community of Nipissing First Nation and recreate several of those resources in the Nipissing dialect.”
See: Nipissing First Nation preserves culture through Nishnaabemwin language classes
The course is designed for anyone, so students with no previous Ojibwe language skills are welcome. McLeod explained that “Upon entering the online classes and following along attentively with the materials I share, students can go from no awareness of the Nipissing dialect to being able to express conservatively hundreds of thousands of sentences in Ojibwe with one out of four types of the verb classes.”
Interested students across the province are welcome to register for the classes. They can do so by visiting their school’s guidance counsellor.
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
