Nogdawindamin immerses child welfare workers in Anishinaabemowin

Nogdawindamin Family & Community Services hosted an Anishinaabemowin immersion conference in Sault Ste. Marie earlier this week, bringing together a number of its child welfare workers from across the north shore to immerse themselves in the language.

The immersion conference - the fourth one of its kind hosted by the Indigenous child welfare agency - consisted of several language and culture-based teachings and workshops throughout the two-day event.

“Culture is the foundation of the organization,” said executive director Kerry Francis. “Any time we introduce a new service in addition to child welfare, we’re offering a whole series of new prevention initiatives [and] pilot programs to keep kids out of care and keep them at home.”

“Culture becomes part of those new programs and services - it’s significantly important that culture is embedded in everything we do, including the language.”

Francis says that cultural aspects are also stressed during the immersion workshops in order to give the 265 Nogdawindamin employees across northern Ontario a look into Indigenous child welfare delivery through a decidedly more historical lens.  

“It’s really important that they understand where our people have been, so that they could work with them,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why we offer these types of immersion camps, so that our staff is familiar with those kind of things that have happened to our Indigenous people historically.”

Mike Bisson - an elder in residence for Nogdawindamin who works from an agency office in Serpent River First Nation - has firsthand knowledge of Canada’s attempts at cultural genocide through the Indian Act, residential schools and the sixties scoop, where thousands of Indigenous children across Canada were taken from their homes and adopted into non-Indigenous families between 1951 and 1991.

“I was not allowed to speak my language - and when I did, I got a strapping,” he told SooToday. “I was only eight years old.”

“They didn’t want us to speak our language, they didn’t want us to practice our culture. They wanted us not to have our identity, but now we’re in a new time,” he continued. “We’re trying to fix a problem, and it’s our culture and our language that will emerge and help us to get to where we need to go, especially in child welfare.”

Delivery of Indigenous language programs have recently been trending towards immersion - much like Nogdawindamin’s language revitalization efforts - in an effort to save those languages from the brink of extinction.

Nogdawindamin elder in residence Darren McGregor wonders aloud how many fluent speakers of Anishinaabemowin there will be in the future, calling the situation “critical.”

“If you look at 50 years ago and how many language speakers we had, it was a great percentage,” he said. “Twenty years ago, that percentage got lower and lower.”

“Today, our percentage is at a critical point, so if we look at 20 years from now, how many fluent would we have left?”

Nogdawindamin intends to host regular Anishinaabemowin immersion gatherings not only for the benefit of its employees, but for alternative care parents and children in care as well.  

“We need more of our young ones to start picking up the language to start realizing the joy that comes [with] speaking your language, because there’s more to speaking language than just talking,” McGregor said. “There’s feeling, there’s so much connectivity to the land, to the animals - to understanding your purpose in life through language.”

Nogdawindamin assumed full responsibility as the child welfare authority for it seven member First Nations across the north shore region in 2017.