Owennatékha Brian Maracle set up a Mohawk language immersion school for children in his community 17 years ago. As an author, journalist and radio host, he knows the power of language and he wanted to reclaim his native language and create a new generation of proficient speakers.
As a result of his work, and his wife Audrey, there are now children growing up on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve near Brantford, Ontario for whom Mohawk is their first language.
computer & internet are “words hung up in the air” or “words that are hung up in front of us.”
The school, Onkwawénna Kentyóhkwa, or ‘Our Language Society’, located in Oshweken, Ontario, provides a two-year immersion program for adults. For his efforts, Brian Maracle was granted an honourary doctorate of letters from nearby Wilfrid Laurier University.
“We’re concentrating on younger people and people who live or work the community, the idea being that we want to create speakers who will then…intermarry, have children and start raising children speaking it as their first language, and that’s happening now,” Maracle told CBC News.
“We do have a few children less than five years old who are speaking it as their first language, and that’s something that hasn’t happened here in like three generations,” said Maracle.
“I haven’t in my conversation with these kids, I haven’t heard them use English,” said Maracle. “That’s really the key to language, we can’t be teaching it forever. These kids have to grow up and start using it themselves.”
“People come into the classroom, we don’t use any English and we start at a part of the language which allows people to have a lot conversational ability without a using very much grammar or vocabulary,” said Maracle. “Then we start adding grammar and vocabulary and gradually build from there.”
Maracle says Mohawk is a descriptive language, and words that didn’t traditionally exist, like computer or Internet, have to be figured out; what’s the best way to describe something?
“When we need a name for something we have to describe what it looks like, or what it does,” he said. A rough translation of computer in Mohawk, for instance, is “words hung up in the air” or “words that are hung up in front of us.” This is a reference to a computer monitor, as opposed to a typewriter which would be “words on paper,” said Maracle.
Marcle’s plan now is to adapt his program so people can complete it and be proficient in one school year instead of two.
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