Of dogs and sweetgrass

and trips across the mountains

When I was young, I just wanted to learn other languages. I spent summers with my grandmother, and on our weekly public library trips I would check out Braille books and try to teach myself to read the raised dots. It was hard to learn - sometimes I’d peek at the patterns if my fingertips couldn’t suss them out, negating the whole process, and eventually I gave up. 

But I studied almost every language available in my high school: Latin, French, German. In college I worked for the DC Schools Project, an organization that matched Georgetown students with DC public school kids, many of whom were first-language Spanish speakers, so then I found myself working with that language community. 

In 1996 I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Nicaragua, living with a family who spoke zero English, while I taught adult English as a Second Language classes. As a result I’ve taught high school Spanish a couple of times, not that I was any good at it, but it helped me think about language instruction in new ways. Then I spent 22 years teaching high school English. Later, COVID project: learn Portuguese! I didn’t, but I still want to.

A Sandinista rally I attended in Managua, Nicaragua, summer 1996

So in 2021 when I left the school district and went to work for the Montana Digital Academy, it should have been no surprise where the road would eventually lead. A phone call to the office in the fall of that year set it all in motion: Jay Eagleman, from the Chippewa Cree Tribe Department of Indian Education, wanted to talk to me about what MTDA was doing for Indigenous language preservation. He later told me that of the 2000 students in the Rocky Boy reservation-area schools, none of them could speak Ojibwe or Cree, the two languages associated with the community, and that this is a crisis in motion. We should be helping.

The truth was our organization had been grappling with this challenge for the better part of a year, since the Montana Legislature had tasked us with providing these courses. MTDA offers asynchronous, online, credit-bearing classes for public school students across the state, but we didn’t offer any in Cree, Blackfeet, Ojibwe, Salish, Crow, or any other of Montana’s heritage languages. This setup (asynchronous, online) was not, perhaps, anyone’s first thought for how to best teach an Indigenous language. But there I was, on the phone with Jay, listening to him explain how public schools had not served students and we needed to do better.

Well, he got no argument from me.

He told me that of the 2000 students in the Rocky Boy-area schools, none of them could speak Ojibwe or Cree, the two languages associated with the community.

I ended up on zoom calls with Jay, Montana state Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, and data analyst Mike Geboe, talking about language classes and language conferences. (I came to affectionately call this group the “J Crew” because of the J, J, and soft G in their names.) Our group from MTDA was requested to attend a language conference in Billings in December where I spoke to a couple hundred people for about 7 minutes about the task ahead: to build the first-ever fully online, asynchronous course in the Cree language for high school students, that we knew of. 

I’d built plenty of online classes before. But never a language class, and certainly never with almost no digital assets to work with. I had to start somewhere. So I made my first trip across the mountains to the Rocky Boy reservation in March of 2022. Rocky Boy sits near what Montanans call the Hi-Line, a northern expanse with a scattering of towns dotting the plains along several hundred miles of highway 2, just south of the Medicine Line (the border with Canada); the Hi-Line is characterized by wind, and flat, and cattle. In late March it is also snowy, like much of the rest of the state.

When I arrived, the office was cold. There was no internal heat system besides a dusty but solid wood stove which was fired up against the chill. There was also no functional plumbing in the office, a fact I could not have anticipated and which led to several hours of agony for me, considering the near-five-hour drive I’d just endured. 

Heat source in the Dept of Indian Education office, March 2022

I had brought gifts, and after delivery of those, the J Crew and I sat down to map out the course. 18 weeks of…what? Eventually, we listed topics like common plants, nutrition, history, animals, the cultural role of sweetgrass, and more. We set up a green screen in the office with a piece of folded fabric and recorded Jay, Jonathan and Mike talking about the importance of language and culture. Later I would layer b-roll of the reservation behind them to create mini videos for the course. 

Then, we jumped in the truck and drove all around the reservation, nearing the tops of the mountains that hump up in the middle of the prairie and form the bulk of the tribal homeland. We visited dams and water sources, and yes…Mike let me into his house to use the bathroom. 

Through the following months Mike would send me audio clips of himself pronouncing words, close to 150 of them, plus longer phrases. For every recorded word, I had to 

• download it from the text message

• upload it to my work computer

• import it into my editing application

• clip it

• save it as its own file

• upload it from my saved folder into the course platform

• create a unique html code and save it in a text file for later use. 

Then I’d take several of these words, say a dozen for animals in the Cree language, and I’d make a handful of activities out of them by copying and pasting those html codes over and over again: first, a list of words for students to listen to, then perhaps a video/picture review, then perhaps a drag-and-drop activity, and finally a memory game (remember Memory? Flipping cards to find matches?) with audio. I spent hours creating these activity sets for each one of the 18 weeks.

Mike shows me what early sweetgrass looks like, April 2022.

I returned to Rocky Boy three more times in the next few months. In April Mike and I ambled around sweetgrass enclosures where he showed me young grass shoots, and we recorded audio near the buffalo pasture. I was ecstatic to find later that meadowlarks are audible in the background of this audio. I also met so many dogs that day. They just show up everywhere you go and sit adorably at your feet. One of them destroyed the end of an audio clip by panting loudly and then lying down on my ipad. I used it in the class anyway. 

On another trip later in the summer, we returned to that enclosure, harvested some grass, and I braided it while my colleague from Missoula grasped the other ends of the blades. The result is an amateurish product that I’m ridiculously proud of. We also visited some very important cultural sites, and I enjoyed more dog time. 

At the risk of including too many photos, here is sweetgrass +dog, July 2022.

Finally in August I finished that course, and we hired a teacher who is certified in Cree language and culture to teach it. In the fall, three students enrolled - all non-Indian students; one from the far northwest corner of the state, one from central Montana, and another from a town on the Hi-Line. This spring, nine students are taking it; four are Indigenous, though we don’t have tribal affiliation information to know if they’re Chippewa Cree or another tribe. 

Jay took one look at my janky braid and handed me an objectively beautiful one to pass along to the Crow language partners I’d be working with next.

Still, my feeling is that the more students who take the course, the more will be educated. They will come out knowing some Cree words, which is great. They will learn some cultural information, also excellent. Students with limited personal exposure to Indigenous peoples will be enlightened - and that may be one of the best outcomes: helping young people develop appreciation, understanding, and a clear sense of their neighbors and themselves. Right?

In September, I started building the Crow language course through a collaboration with the Crow Language Consortium, and that class is now being offered. Next will be Dakota/Nakoda in partnership with the Language and Culture Department at Fort Peck. I’ve already started having dreams about about my partners there, which is always a good sign.

As for me, I may have finished building the Cree language class, but I feel I made some friends up there on the Hi-Line. Those guys (and one woman, Marci, who deserves a righteous mention!) may have moved on to other projects, but the J Crew has permanently lodged themselves into my personal folder of warm feelings. The bouncy truck rides, the wild beauty of their homeland, the food and jokes and important conversations...I carry all of it in my memory as I move into other parts of my work. In helping them pull their past into the future of their language community, I reconnected my early love of language to a modern-day experience, where I get to assist with the worthiest cause. 

Marci and me at the summer 2022 Class 7 conference. We did not plan to twin, but there we were. My skirt was a gift from the J Crew+Marci.