Documenting Chippewa [ciw] Conversation and Training Indigenous Scholars

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This project will document Chippewa [ciw] (Ojibwe)conversation and other non-narrative speech genres in at least three distinct varieties, filling a gap in the current documentation of the language. The research team will work with six Chippewa Elders to record, translate, transcribe, and annotate at least 22 hours of conversation and other text types. The resulting archive can be consulted by language students and linguists, and will be used in the production of interactive multimedia learning modules. This software may serve as a model for other indigenous nations in their own language revitalization efforts.

This documentation project focuses on conversation, since from a socio-linguistic perspective, discourse is at the heart of language and culture. For first speakers of Chippewa, naming their world in collaborative dialogue is an essential act of cultural production that is vital for documentation and seminal for revitalization. This research may produce breakthroug contributions to Ojibwe language teaching and learning, by providing lessons based on natural conversation and other forms of discourse. The documentation project will strengthen networks across communities and institutions while training emerging second language speakers in Ojibwe documentary linguistics and involving them in software production. Documentation, training, archive creation and distribution all dovetail and overlap in reciprocal ways in this project. This project builds on previous work (funded by the Department of Education, 'Ojibwe Movies') in the creation of an interactive multimedia software for teaching and learning Ojibwemowin ('Ojibwemodaa' distributed by Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia).