NORTHERN LANGUAGES PROGRAM

For the past several years, Common Weal has partnered with visual artist Michèle Mackasey and local Elders to bring artistic and cultural programming to Northern Saskatchewan communities. The most common feedback we have received from Elders and other community members is how critical it is to them that the youth retain their original languages and find a way to make them relevant and usable in their daily lives. 

Over the past year, Michèle has been partnering with Elders who have expertise in languages to stimulate discussions about the history of Indigenous languages and the impact of residential schools on languages in the region. Together, they have developed plans to create a collective “bottle portrait” constructed of many tiny glass bottles filled with coloured liquid to create a pixelated image when the bottles are placed side by side, each with a tiny message engraved into the outside. The portrait will be made in the likeness of a local student who passed away in the Beauval Indian Residential School and was a classmate of one of the program Elders. In order to engrave messages onto the bottles, we partnered with Chevez Ezaneh, a Denesuline keyboard developer working on Indigenous language keyboards that can be used to type syllabics onto the plexiglass bottles using a laser printer. Youth have worked alongside Elders, choosing a word in their own language to engrave onto a bottle as their own tiny messages within the portrait. The youth have responded strongly to the keyboards, and the language teachers in the community are finding the activities motivate their students to learn vocabulary in a new way. 

 “The keyboard lights up and the kids, they were really interested in that. They think that’s a cool gadget that they have, and once they start typing, they have smiles.”  - Carol Estralshenen

When many northern Elders and community members were evaluated during the summer wildfires, Michèle brought programming to the Saskatoon White Buffalo Youth Lodge, reaching out to local young people and Northern families evacuated to Saskatoon. The artworks coming out of these collective artmaking activities will be exhibited, creating a dialogue about the beauty and value of distinct local dialects of Indigenous languages, as well as the struggles and will to maintain and revitalize these languages within the communities.