I'm really excited.

Today we had a really unique opportunity.

Blacks has for a long time been running a program called Angie, been Modernizing, which means changing lives.

The tribe identified language and culture as an essential component of long, healthy, happy living in indigenous communities.

And they had some money that came in through grants.

And, we're looking at the best way to allocate resources and decided that rather than running the elders ragged, just trying to teach everything they know with a really time sensitive effort, we identified 25 fluent speakers left in the community of blacks at the time that this work started.

We said, let's set them up to teach people for hundreds of years to come.

The tribe got behind it and got all of it in motion.

I wrote a story about how I got and, Department of Transportation working with the men.

I was the first woman and the first native to be hired in the state of Minnesota in Brainerd for men that.

So I wrote about that.

We've actually published five books now, through this effort, all almost all of the work has happened at the just before Covid hit.

And through the entire Covid pandemic.

During this time, several of the elders passed away.

Probably 20% of the fluent speakers in blacks passed away through Covid.

So it has been a trying time.

But coming through this far with the pandemic and all of the work to see the fruits of their efforts, to see their voices preserved in perpetuity and being used now to teach and advance our language is really heartening and exciting.

The whole community is really th I'm here for the, signing of our books that we all are so fond and I think is pretty exciting.

I don't think I'm an author.

The Minnesota Historical Society has a lot of faith in the elders and blacks.

They publish these five books in a language that no one on the staff there can read, which is pretty remarkable.

And through their support, we will actually be able to keep the books in print in perpetuity and have the marketing and distribution mechanism for that organization behind this work.

So it's not just a modern paw print operation or the needle lost in a stack of needles somewhere on Amazon, but it'll really have longevity and and access across the Ojibwe world.

Most of the books, the stories that we wrote was stuff that happened to us.

Who knew a young or things that we did like but were racing, and how to make maple sirup and to go fish and clean their own fish that they catch different things like that.

What to do?

Make sure that you do your your ceremonial stuff when you have to.

So the five books cover a spectrum of, you know, themes and, you know, kind of age, target age levels and so forth.

But the full Ojibwe language is on display in all of the communities on the United States.

There are just some hundreds of speakers left.

And, you know, they're all elders.

These are very endangered dialects of Ojibwe.

Because there isn't hardly anybody that talks the boy anymore.

I know, some of them can can understand that, but they can't get, you know, but it's coming back, I see it, it's coming back.

Feels good to hear people talk and and you understand them.

It might look easy from the outside, but it is hard work for most indigenous languages.

Their fluent speakers are not literate.

They don't read and write in the indigenous language that they speak so well.

So, you know, and the people who are developing writing systems and tools like linguists or maybe students at a university, they're usually not fluent speakers.

So you got to build a really unique set of skills around literacy in both the elders and the people who are doing the transcription work.

And it all has to be right, you know, and to high academic standards.

But we didn't have too much problems.

We just told your stories and you knew everything was funny.

We had a lot of laughs, but we're very comfortable with what we were doing.

The future vitality of Ojibway is not certain, but it is certainly possible because of what these elders have done.