īīnnii...

language and sustenance

I’ve been working with Browning Public Schools on a language project which I finished today. The last few weeks have been a blur of every act I know how to perform on a computer to create something language-based that is also digitized. Vague, I know, but I do this to develop language courses, or digital instructional materials, or in this case, an online language assessment.

To assess all the students’ language acquisition, I ended up creating 78 separate “quizzes”¹ with something like 500 questions, nearly all with an audio file and/or an image. The audio files came from a language expert in Browning, in long recordings that I edited into one- or two-second pieces before using them as prompts or responses in these quiz questions.

There is an incredible amount of detail and logistics to consider. For example, if you want to assess Kindergartners’ language skills using multiple choice questions on an iPad, you’ll have to read everything to them. To ensure the iPads match what the teacher is projecting on the board, I have to turn off the randomized choices and don’t shuffle choices. But we do want these features on the 8th graders’ assessments, which I means I need duplicate questions for everything.

The content of the assessments also matters. You don’t want to ask students to identify a muskrat in Blackfoot unless they’ve been taught this word. So I also had to check every question against my language partner’s findings about the curriculum.

Calf at the Bison Range, 2013.

In the process of editing, listening, adding, QCing all the audio in this project, I learned so many Blackfoot words! Lodge, sun, woman, and so many animals including of course the word for chickadee. Due to all this ongoing work with tribes, I know the word for buffalo in several languages because everyone’s got a word for that quintessential animal.

When I visited Browning in June to participate in a teacher training, we had a brief presentation from the tribally-affiliated group that manages their īīnnii. We enjoyed samples of buffalo jerky and other products which were astonishingly tasty. You can’t obtain this exact stuff in other places,² so I went straight to Glacier Family Foods in Browning and bought three packages of jerky and two pounds of ground bison, raised and harvested on the Blackfeet reservation. Every time I visit, I’ll be stopping over to replenish the supply.

I remain utterly grateful for the work that’s been placed in front of me, and the freedom to become so engrossed in it. I turn 51 this weekend, and I can’t really imagine a better way to spend the best years of my working life than in this Indigenous language preservation endeavor.³

1. it’s not really a quiz like you think about for a grade or something. That’s just what the platform we use calls them. It’s a way to set up an assessment that is mostly auto-scored.

2. Here’s a story about this project

3. Although I am going off for a little vacation this weekend, no work for a few days!