NORTHERN LANGUAGES PROGRAM

The Northern Languages Program grew out of a stream of requests that artist Michèle Mackasey received from Elders and other community members while she was creating art programming in the Northern Saskatchewan communities of Patuanak, Beauval, and Île-à-la-Crosse. Michèle felt an urgency in these requests and was drawn to respond. She joined in consultation with Elders, basket makers and Language Keepers to plan their most ambitious programming yet, making decisions about the direction that future activities should take. Intuitively, the plans for sharing language were woven into plans for gathering materials on the land, gathering together in the cabins by the water, and sharing creative, ancestral  practices such as basketmaking. Along with these activities, they chose to engage the young people and families through introducing unique Indigenous language keyboards, specifically designed for each place and dialect, and through which participants can learn to communicate in daily life with their own languages. This technology will be used throughout the project and continue to evolve with the language expertise that exists within the communities. Currently, Denesuline keyboard developer Chevez Ezaneh and Patuank Elder and Dene language specialist Carol Estralshenen are in consultation to develop a Dene language keyboard. 

Canadian Anishinaabe author Susan Chiblow describes Indigenous languages as bound with the land, with relational ways of naming, seeing, and relating to the world, uttering aspects of a specific waterway or terrain in unique and intimate ways. These languages lend themselves to active learning that takes place in the home community, on or near the land. 

As the weather warms and the sap begins to flow, the Patuanak basket makers begin to collect materials for workshops where students gather in cabins by the river, to work closely with Elder Leona Aubichon, as she shows how to treat and form birchbark into beautiful and useful baskets, in the same way that she was taught by her grandmother. Through this immersion of Indigenous language in their daily life, young people grow to understand that everything comes from the land— food, family, language, knowledge—and that an intimate connection to the land is embedded within the language itself.