wayfaring: march 6 — 11, 2007
"wayfaring" ZJC (2007)
Tuesday, March 6, will be Robert Busby's funeral. March 10 will be my 37th birthday. A lot is going on this week. It is also a chance to take a Spring Break from my biology class for a couple of days. Where would one go on Spring Break with limited funds and limited time? Sault Ste. Marie in northern Michigan, of course!
I will be spending my time up north studying; I am starting a journey of sorts and I will share with you what happens. I am going to start learn (slowly since everything is slow when I do it) Ojibwemowin, the language of the Ojibwe peoples.
The Ojibwe (also spelled Ojibway) call themselves, Anishinaabek; part of the Three Fires Confederacy of Native tribes stretching from Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota up into southern Canada. The author Louise Erdrich (who wrote Tracks among other things, a must read for everyone) came out with a book, a sort of meditation/ reflection/ memoir, called Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington DC: National Geographic Directions, 2003). I recommend it to everyone. This small selection I quote here is a nice introduction into the language I hope to begin learning soon:
My grandfather, Patrick Gournea, was the last person in our family who spoke his native language, Ojibwemowin, with any fluency. When he went off into the Turtle Mountain woods to pray with his pipe, I stood apart at a short distance, listening and wondering. Growing up in an ordinary small North Dakota town, I thought Ojibwemowin was a language for prayers, like the solemn Latin sung at High Mass. I had no idea that most Ojibwe people on reserves in Canada, and many in Minnesota and Wisconsin, still speak English as a second language, Ojibwemowin as their first. And then, while visiting Manitoulin Island, Ontario, I sat among a group of laughing elders who spoke only their own language. I went to a café where people around me spoke Ojibwemowin and stood in a line at a bank surrounded by Ojibwe speakers. I was hooked, and had to know more. I wanted to get the jokes, to understand the prayers and the adisookaanug, the sacred stories, and most of all, Ojibwe irony. As most speakers are now bilingual, the language is spiked with puns on both English and Ojibwemowin, most playing on the oddness of gichi-mookomaan, that is "big knife" or American, habits and behavior. (81)
As I was living in New Hampshire at the time, my only resource was to use a set of Ojibwe language tapes made by Basil Johnson, the distinguished Canadian Ojibwe writer. Unknown to Basil Johnson, he became my friend. His patient Anishinaabe voice reminded me of my grandfather's and of the kindest of elders. Basil and I conversed in the isolation of my car as I dropped off and picked up children, brought groceries, navigated tangled New England roads. I carried my tapes everywhere I went. The language bit deep into my heart, but I could only go so long talking with Basil on a tape. I longed for real community. At last, when I moved Minnesota, I met fellow Ojibwe people who were embarked on what seems at times a quixotic enterprise — learning one of the toughest languages ever invented.
Ojibwemowin is, in fact, entered in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the most difficult languages to learn. The great hurdle to learning resides in the manifold use of verbs — a stammer-inducing complex. Ojibwemowin is a language of action, which makes sense to me. The Ojibwe have never been all that materialistic, and from the beginning they were always on the move. How many things, nouns, could anyone carry around? Ojibwemowin is also a language of human relationships. Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there can be as many as six thousand forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb form not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all the time. Mookegidaazo describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell off a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be a verb for anything … (82-83)
… Ojibwemowin is the primary language of philosophy, and also of emotions, Shades of feeling can be mixed like paints. Kawiin gego omaa ayasinoon, a phrase used when describing loneliness, carries additional meaning of missing a part of one's own being. Ojibwe is especially good at describing intellectual and dream states … andopawatchigan … means "seek your dream," but is a lot more complicated. It means that first you have to find and identify your dream, often through fasting, and then that you also must carry out exactly what your dream tells you to do in each detail. And then the philosophy comes in, for by doing this repeatedly you will gradually come into a balanced relationship with all of life. (84)
That is not to say Ojibwemowin is an elevated language of vanished spirituality. One of my favorite words is wiindibaanens or computer. It means "little brain machine." (85)
I will return on Sunday and tell you all about it when I get back to a computer …