Fond du Lac Tribal College
Fond du Lac Tribal College
Quick Facts
2010 Activities:
Offer Fond du Lac Family language camp. Receive training for Ojibwe language immersion teaching. Develop Ojibwe immersion curriculum. Publish 2,000 copies of Daga Anishinaabemodaa with illustrations and audio CD. Establish feeder college and pre K-12 school network. Draft guidelines and establish elder-student apprenticeships. Set up and announce website. Accept students and pre K-12 teachers for Ottertail language camp for summer 2011 and promise financial support. Evaluate all grant activities.
2011 Activities
The Fond du Lac Tribal College will provide two-day language immersion weekends for students and teachers having intermediate level fluency. They will be offered one weekend each month for eight months from September 2011 through April 2012. The weekends will focus on participatory activities including individual and small group discussions, skits, meal preparation, games, and field trips to seasonal camps. A wing of the college dormitory will also be set aside for language students to speak Ojibwe together and participate in language enrichment programming.
2012 Activities
The Fond du Lac Tribal College will expand the dimensions of their immersion academy and follow up weekends by incorporating two new program goals and four new program objectives. They will incorporate language documentation and dissemination into the Ojibwe Immersion Academy by the recording, broadcasting, and publishing of elder’s stories. Additionally, they will expand the follow up opportunities for graduates and develop a master-apprentice model, as well as, an internship opportunity at an immersion school for academy graduates.
About the Issue
Minnesota’s most enduring languages are in danger of disappearing. Without timely intervention, the use of Dakota and Ojibwe languages – like indigenous languages throughout the globe -- will decline to a point beyond recovery.
These languages embody irreplaceable worldviews. They express, reflect, and maintain communal connections and ways of understanding the world. Deeper than the disuse of vocabulary or grammar, the loss of an indigenous language is destruction of a complex system for ordering the relationships among people and the natural world, for solving social problems, and connecting people to something beyond themselves.