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Q & A with visiting lecturer Netaa-niimid Aamookwe, Persia Erdrich
Netaa-niimid Aamookwe, Persia Erdrich, is the inaugural lecturer in the Rodney S. Wallace Visiting Lectureship series for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. A graduate of the Ojibwe language program in the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, she teaches the Wezhinoo’igejig cohort, a group of early childhood educators pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree while studying Ojibwe language and immersion pedagogy. Netaa-niimid sat down with us to discuss her career trajectory as well as the unique value of a degree in education. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ICD: Did you have early exposure to the Ojibwe language in your family?
Netaa-niimid Aamookwe: The last fluent Ojibwe speaker in my family was my great-grandfather Patrick. My grandmother does not speak Ojibwe. But my mother started taking classes when we moved to Minneapolis, and I would go with her as a kid. I remember she labeled everything in our house in Ojibwe, and when we went for walks we would practice, and we had tapes in the car. But I didn’t really focus on learning it until I was older. We immersion educators talk about “lighting the fire,” and that’s what happened for me.
I went to Minneapolis Community and Technical College and transferred to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities because of its Ojibwe language program. At the time, the U offered three years of Ojibwe classes with two amazing linguists. There were only three students in the major in my graduating class–but the program has gotten bigger over time. People come to the U from all over to study the language. The classes are now hybrid, so people are Zooming in from Canada and elsewhere. There’s a dorm for Ojibwe language students. There are different clubs and even Ojibwe language quiz bowls. But the biggest, most amazing resource that the U has is the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary. I always want to highlight that when I’m talking about the language, because I use it every day.
Netaa-niimid Aamookwe, Persia Erdrich, and son Ogimaagaabaw, Patrick. Photo courtesy of Netaa-niimid Aamookwe.
How did you get involved in teaching Ojibwe, or teaching in Ojibwe?
NA: During my junior year at the U, I realized I had taken all the Ojibwe classes that there were, but I couldn’t tell a good joke or story or understand the jokes or stories that elders told. So in 2011, with my friends Lucia Bonacci and Michelle Goose, I started an Ojibwe immersion camp for adults: Ojibwemotaadidaa Omaa Gidakiiminaang, or the Adult Immersion Academy—we called it an academy to sound fancy! We lived with elders in the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College dorms for three weeks during the summer. We only spoke Ojibwe. We had one hour of access a day to our phones and computers. We would take field trips and give directions in Ojibwe, and we had a fun scavenger hunt where we had to guide elders around in Ojibwe. All of the students started dreaming in Ojibwe.
Sadly, most of those elders have now passed away. I knew at the time that that was coming and that there was this urgency. But that time now has come, and it’s really difficult. The Academy, though, is still running today on the Fond du Lac Reservation, and it is run by University of Minnesota students.
After that, I worked for three years in an Ojibwe immersion early childhood education program and grew that program to become year-round. Part of that was a master apprenticeship program, which meant that over the course of the year I would visit and stay with two elders on the Mille Lacs Reservation. My proficiency levels took off, and I got connected with people in the language immersion field.
Bdote Learning Center was just starting out in Minneapolis, and I taught there for its first year. I didn’t have a teaching license yet, so I attended night school at Hamline to get it. Then I moved to Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation and taught at Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Institute for six years. While I was there I had my son, Ogimaagaabaw, Patrick. He was born in April 2020, which was a hard time, but it turned out to be an amazing experience for creating a first-language Ojibwe speaker. The plan had been for Patrick to attend daycare—there wasn’t an Ojibwe immersion daycare, so it would have been an English-speaking daycare. But because of the pandemic, he was actually at home with me while I taught kindergarten immersion online, which was wild. I made a little studio in my house, and he was part of it all. He was listening and getting all that language, and he didn’t hear English except when I spoke English with his father. Patrick’s first word was Ojibwe, so I realized: “I’ve got to keep going with this.”
After schools reopened, I started working with a group of parents in Fond du Lac, including Lucia and Michelle and fellow graduates of the adult immersion camp. Elders came up with the idea of an early childhood immersion program for parents who were raising their kids in Ojibwe, which became Gookonaanig Endaawaad. We traveled around on field trips, went to the zoo—everything we did was in Ojibwe.
Gookonaanig Endaawaad became a preschool as our kids got older, and we made it a lab school so that we could train more teachers there. All of those teachers are still there, but we lost a lot of federal funding last year, and I really missed my family here in Minneapolis. So it ended up being the right time for me to move back to Minneapolis. But that’s an important part of the story, too. If you look at the last four generations of my family and their relationship to the language, my grandmother doesn’t speak it, my mom learned some, I learned it, and Patrick—who is named after his great-great-grandfather—is a native speaker. But Patrick goes to an English-speaking school now, and we struggle to keep his Ojibwe going. Shoutout to Minneapolis Public Schools’ American Indian Education, because they have come out to Patrick’s school and been involved in getting him what he needs. They celebrated him when he got an award from the school nurse for teaching her Ojibwe words. It’s his first language, and it influences his worldview and his thinking, and he still understands and responds in Ojibwe, but his big interest right now is not language, it’s space!
How is being an immersion teacher different from other types of classroom teaching?
NA: As an immersion teacher, you are often working long hours because you are translating or creating your own curriculum. At the schools I have worked at, elders guided the creation of a land-based curriculum, because that was not something that existed yet. There is a lot more out there now specifically for Ojibwe immersion teaching, which is something that I touched on in my talk for the Rodney S. Wallace Visiting Lectureship series.
Immersion teaching works your brain in a whole other way—especially in early childhood, where maybe someone just threw up, and you’re trying to stay in the language and be comforting to the child. I made the decision early on not to break into English, even in those moments. The first day of school was really: “This is how you ask to go to the bathroom, and this is how you do those survival things.”
One thing I really stressed in my talk is that there’s no perfect way to do all of this. Everything is a success. I remember the first year I was teaching at Bdote, I ended up with a classroom consisting of five boys at the end of the school year. They were really wild, and there were bloody noses every day. I thought to myself, “Are any of them learning Ojibwe?” Then one day, at snack time, I saw that collectively they had chewed pretzels and arranged them into the word “boogit”—which means “fart”—and still to this day, I am really proud of that.
Photo courtesy of Netaa-niimid Aamookwe.
Tell us a little bit about the new role you have taken on in addition to teaching in the Wezhinoo’igejig program.
NA: I’m a program officer with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, a national organization that is based in Little Canada and works with all tribes. I’ve realized that really, without our land, we don’t have our language. So in my job, I get to work with tribes to empower their language revitalization programs. It’s been really interesting working with people from other tribes and backgrounds and finding other language activists in this space. There are not many Ojibwe activists in philanthropy, and this is a perfect way to still make a difference. I’ve really enjoyed being on the other side of grant applications—not applying, but being able to advocate and say, “This is a really valuable program that should be funded.”
I’m grateful because I still get to teach a class in the Wezhinoo’igejig: Ojibwe Scholars in Early Childhood program—it’s an online class, so people are Zooming in from Mille Lacs, Red Cliff, Bad River, Lac Courte Oreilles, White Earth, Leech Lake and locally. I am still connected with my immersion teacher colleagues, and we’re actually about to start a new, grant-funded program for immersion weekends. Patrick and I will be participating once a month, and it’s going to feel so good to be Netaa-nimiid and Ogimaagaabaw again.
It must feel really different to not be working in a classroom.
NA: Yes, but I also stress to my students that my degrees in education have really helped me in my new role. Getting a degree in early childhood or elementary education—you can use those skills in any workplace. For example, at my particular job, I work with people from all over the country who have their own traditions and cultures and ways of being. That is a major emphasis in your whole teaching career: being inclusive of everybody in your classroom. I get to bring that to my work, and I really think my degrees have served me. Teachers learn these character-building, internal skills, like patience and inclusivity, that really serve you in any job working with people.
Of course, we are always short on teachers, and we want people to choose that profession, but it’s good for students to know that an education degree will not restrict them. Most of the teachers that I know have gone through career changes, such as teaching a different grade—like one of my assistants who was working as an early childhood educator but now teaches high school. One of her students has difficulty with reading, and her literacy education knowledge has really served her.
There are also all kinds of opportunities for people who speak Ojibwe, so learning it is a good career move. There are classes that build incredible community, a Rosetta Stone Ojibwe course. A student at Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Institute who was one of the three people in my graduating class at the U is doing Ojibwe hockey commentating. We’re a small but mighty community, and we’re very inclusive of everybody who wants to learn. Dakota speakers are, too.
I do miss the classroom, but I’m excited about taking on this other role and supporting younger teachers in the Wezhinoo’igejig cohort. Most of them are teaching full time, and some are parents, and they are taking four classes. I can help them get their degree and support their language. These younger teachers’ language skills skyrocket. A different part of our worldview, too, is that a good life means other people are able to learn from you and replace you. It doesn’t mean that you have to cling onto your job. That changes how you think about your career.