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The effort to preserve Indigenous languages in Minnesota got a big boost in recent days, as more than 100 people came together in Morton in an effort to celebrate and revive Dakota and Ojibwe languages.

The fifth annual Dakota and Ojibwe Language Symposium was held at the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Morton, bringing together educators and community members Feb. 25-27. They worked on and discussed efforts to preserve the Dakota and Ojibwe languages.

The symposium was held in partnership with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council’s Language Revitalization Working group and the Minnesota Humanities Center.

It also served as a networking opportunity for individuals and language professionals in connecting them to resources while elevating the visibility of Indigenous languages in Minnesota. 

There are only four first language Dakota language speakers left in Minnesota, all of whom are over the age of 68, according to Skyler Kuczaboski, grants administrative specialist for the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. She said there are also fewer than 1,000 Ojibwe first language speakers left in the state.

“A lot of our first language speakers are elders, and that’s a huge loss that we deal with,” Kuczaboski said. “We come together to kind of talk about how we’re going to move forward. We’re not going to let this stop us. We know how important it is to revitalize our languages.”

Vanessa Good Thunder of Lower Sioux Indian Community was one of the symposium hosts. She said it’s important to continue preserving languages as they’re intrinsically tied to Indigenous people’s culture and history.

“Language is a need. It is the central part of all of our community,” Good Thunder said. “So that has our well-being tied to it, has our world view tied to it. …[language] is a need, and we see all of the wonderful work that happens when people know language, then they're healing themselves, thus we're strengthening our sovereignty because of that sense of belonging, and we know where we want to go if we know who we are, so we know where we want to go, and that's because of the language.”

Gimiwan Dustin Burnette, executive director of the Midwest Indigenous Immersion Network—a Native American-led Minnesota-based nonprofit dedicated to the revitalization of the Ojibwe and other indigenous languages—said there’s shared common needs statewide, and the hope is to find a pathway to find common and holistic solutions through collaboration between tribes, the state and individual educators.

“This is a collective responsibility, and we cannot put the onus of responsibility for language and cultural preservation on school-age students,” Burnette said. “We need to do this as individuals who make up a larger community of Ojibwe and Dakota people.”

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Indigenous language speakers, educators and advocates gathered last week for the fifth annual Dakota and Ojibwe Language Symposium with a shared goal of growing the number of native language speakers in Minnesota. 

'Language is a need': Ojibwe, Dakota speakers work to preserve, revive Indigenous languages

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