the hardest part about, like saying that a language is dying is to say that it's dying, right?

I'm not of that mentality at all.

It's like languages don't die.

They just kind of go to sleep or they go into hibernation.

My parents did not speak.

There is a story, though, that on my mom's side, she spoke she spoke, Anishinaabe on.

But they didn't know that she had, because they thought, like she had forgotten it all.

But I guess on her deathbed, she suffered a stroke, and that's all she could speak on her deathbed was the moment I was born.

And look at her, raised, by both my parents.

My both my parents were, raised Catholic.

I remember just going back, like, as far back as, like, high school, being really passionate about learning the language.

An elder by the name of Ruth Corbin, she, was the first person that really said, well, you can really learn this language if you put, you know, you put your mind to it.

And I just remember, like grinding out learning words.

And then I ended up going to community college for a period.

And I met a man named David Bennett.

And, oh, that guy, he scared the hell out of me because he didn't speak any English to us in the classroom.

And it was my first real experience, right, of like, this is what learning a second language is like.

So I dropped out of that class, I but you could say that I ran away from it.

I didn't want to deal with it.

And then but he kept kind of popping up every once in a while and like saying things, you know, like how important it is to like, go back to our culture and, you know, like what what it means to like, learn a language.

And it was basically a challenge.

So I was like, well, I'm not really one to back down for a challenge, am I?

So I came back and I was you mean him like got really close, like towards the end of like by the time I graduated in 2010 and by that time I already gotten, I had already gotten accepted to UW Madison.

So I got my background is, an associates degree and Native American Studies with Ojibwe language as the emphasis in the focus.

And then my bachelor's and master's degrees are in linguistics and teacher education.

When I came here, all of the Ojibwe language classes were only two credits.

So we're working to change them to full four credit courses, which is that fancy language where one word can mean like five different things in English.

So I remember while gushing about Ashley, they asked for a word to like to squeeze, like something out of a tube and they got a word to like, squeeze the toothpaste out of someone and while walking goes, well, how do you squeeze the toothpaste out of someone?

And Vargas just replies, what's oh, come here, I'll show you.

You know, and it's just like here.

Like it's like it's not just toothpaste, it's like that, that oil or that that liquid that comes out of tubes.

It's just like it's it's the humor in the language almost.

And that's what's fascinating to me about it.

And so like with that regard, it's, you know, they have books on, you know, science terminology, math terms.

There's a whole book on vulgarity that they did.

And it's, you know, and that's fascinating to me.

It's like, oh, you want to learn these words here?

Here's a whole book on them.

Here's how, you know, here's how to, you know, here's here's the word for the that, you know, the, the Dewey Decimal System, here's a decimal point.

And, you know, and I don't know any of those words because they're like, you know, 17 syllables long, but, you know, but that's that's, that's that's proof that the language is evolving and it's growing.

But if I get like 45 seconds of silence, I've turned one of them on you, I and it's again gain an energy.

I.

And how old are you know, how are how are you today and it's always the same answer.

All right.

No, go ahead, goes the echoes.

I say I get the echoes of honey, you're always tired.

Tell me something new.

Right?

Like give me something else.

Oh, no, no, no, I don't say okay, okay.

Go ahead.

Okay.

And don't say that I don't like hearing that because it's it's that that's the go to answer, right?

It's like I'm not here to hear you say you're.

Well, I want you to tell me how you're feeling.

That's how you use the language.

So all teasing about and, you know, I, and, you know, I, I think when it's a hang, you guys, and that's that's you when you speak, that's what you say.

Like, there's like, five different ways to say I love you.

They're stories from my dad's side.

Said that he had his grandmother spoke.

She she kept the language hidden.

And she would only speak to her brothers.

But she was deaf, so they would.

So they had to be sitting right in front of her.

But she could read lips really well.

And so she would have conversations with them.

And Ojibway, I'll say an indigenous cause, because that's where I'm from.

I'm from a, you know, a region where we say an indigenous cause instead of indigenous cause.

And that's a that's a variation.

And there are places who say that they'll say negation occurs or indigenous cause some people will break off vowels altogether.

It's like, you know, are we accounting for spelling systems like that?

I think, you know, there's we need to have that space for, you know, for learning.

We need a teacher to, you know, we need to teach it in the classrooms a certain way, but allow for like, oh, we say it this way.

Okay, I can you explain why or like, where are you from?

Like having that third space there so that they can learn it.

And I might be off my rocker on that, but I feel like that's how we learn.

We learn from each other, not just I'm.

I know what I'm teaching because I went to school for it.

No, this person's got some knowledge of the language.

What?

How do you say it?