A language too beautiful to lose

Since we've begun our project, six of our informants, our friends, have died, including Mark Wakanabo, who worked as a janitor at our tribal school for decades until someone realized that since he was a fluent speaker, it would be better if he pushed young minds toward the language rather than pushed a broom. He was a sweet man, about whom I knew very little, except that he was gentle, with a soft voice. Two of his sons (identical twins) were my friends through middle and high school.

Luckily, other people are working on making more Ojibwe speakers. My good friends Keller Paap, along with his wife Lisa LaRonge, David Bisonette, Thelma Nayquonabe, Harold Frogg, Rose Tainter, Monica White and others, have started an Ojibwe language immersion school named Waadookodaading (We Help Each Other) on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in north-central Wisconsin. The school has been in operation for six years, and all the children in the program have passed fifth-grade aptitude tests mandated by the state of Wisconsin. Sixty-six percent of them scored in the top 10 percentiles in English and math, compared with a much lower passing rate among students in the tribal and public schools on and near the reservation. And yet the students at Waadookodaading received no instruction in English and their math was taught in Ojibwe.

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LAST spring, I went spearing with Keller Paap and Dave Bisonette on a lake in their treaty area. Band members fought for and won the right to continue exercising their treaty rights on ceded land, and so they do. One of those rights is to spear and net walleye pike during the spring spawn. It is cold on the water in April, and it was that night. We took the boat across Round Lake to the northeastern shore and into the shallow waters where the fish spawn. One person ran the motor, the other stood in front wearing a headlamp and speared the fish with a long pole. With a few modern modifications, this is something we have done for centuries.

The night was very foggy. Mist skated over the water and billowed up, disturbed, over the gunwales of the boat. We kept close to shore. Round Lake is a resort lake and many of its bays and inlets are packed with houses. (It is rumored that Oprah Winfrey has a house there.) Most of these places were closed up, shuttered, waiting for the tourists to come in for the summer. The docks reached down into the lake as if testing the water, but finding it too cold, drew up halfway on the banks. Yet here and there, lights shone from living room windows. And when the house was perched especially close to the lake, we could see televisions glowing ghostly and blue.

It was past 10 -- time for Letterman and Leno. Dave and Keller and I spoke Ojibwe over the puttering motor and the watery stab of the spear going down into the water and the clang as it came out with a walleye wiggling against the barbs. The pile of fish grew on the bottom of the boat, and they flapped dully, trying to fly against the unforgiving aluminum sky of the boat. A dog barked from shore. I could hear, clearly, Letterman's Top Ten List coming from an open window. Fish scales, knocked loose by the tines of the spear, were plastered all over the inside of the boat, and they sparkled like jewels when swept by the lamplight.

This way of life and the language that goes with it felt suddenly, almost painfully, too beautiful to lose; too impossibly beautiful and unique to be drowned out by the voice of a talk show host or by any other kind of linguistic static. And I thought then, with a growing confidence I don't always have: We might just make it.