Skateboarding, snowboarding: New magazine builds Ojibwe vocabulary, highlighting contemporary hobbies
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Bois Forte Band of Chippewa citizen Khayman Goodsky remembers watching her uncles skateboard around Duluth in her childhood.
“It was really rare to see Native skateboarders doing their thing in the ‘90s,” Goodsky said. Watching them sparked an interest in the activity and followed Goodsky into adulthood.
Today, she loves to skateboard regularly despite taking a tumble every now and then.
“I think it's the fact that I can get out there and be outside with my friends and my son and make it just a regular, normal thing for us to do,” said Goodsky.
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Now, through a newly launched monolingual magazine, Goodsky has Ojibwe words for her hobby. The publication brings attention to non-traditional topics through narrative essays, poems and other works written in the Ojibwe language — creating new Ojibwe words for modern concepts.
The magazine is titled Asab, which means “net.” Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians citizen Nick Bimose Reo created the project. He teaches Indigenous studies at Simon Fraser University in Ontario.
“The idea is that Asab can capture a lot of different topics,” Reo said.
Asab is creating resources on topics that may not have an extensive vocabulary list, such as wild rice harvesting and maple syrup processing — two traditional activities.
The first volume covers skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing.
“There's less readily available vocabulary for trying to engage in those activities using our language,” Reo said.
The magazine's team worked with hobbyists and first-language speakers to find ways to define skateboarding and its lingo. A list with various English terminology translated into Ojibwe is printed inside.
For example, ditibiseyaaboono describes the action of “he or she skateboards.”
Other terms include maamakaajisagishkige, meaning “skate trick,” or zhooshkwaakabizo, meaning “boardslide.”
“Each issue will delve into a different topic and try to bring forward as much language as we can on that topic,” Reo said. He says Asab will be released once per year with hopes to eventually publish more frequently.
Asab partnered with various organizations across the United States and Canada, including two Minnesota-based programs — the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s Language Program and the Midwest Indigenous Immersion Network.
Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe citizen Dustin Morrow helped in the editing process of the first volume. He majored in the Ojibwe language at the University of Minnesota and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at the university.
Morrow says he sees the publication as a bridge between the past and present.
“I like to think that it could be a bridge between who we historically are, and then this modern notion of who we are,” Morrow said. “You're using all of these tools that they had hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, to talk about modern ideas.”
He adds that evolving the language to include non-traditional activities brings Ojibwe out of classroom environments and into daily life.
“This is in our leisure, this is in our downtime. We get to enjoy, pretty much, fully being Anishinaabe outside of where you would normally expect it in today's world,” Morrow said.
Call for contributions
From near and far, Asab received submissions from Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and parts of Canada.
Aamookwe Amy McCoy is a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She worked on Asab’s production team and contributed her own written piece.
Her piece, which highlights snowboarding, is titled, “Ishpabazigwa’on! Gegoo giga-zegi’igosiin gegoo!” The English translation is “Catch big air! Be afraid of nothing!”
McCoy wrote the article for her tribal nation’s newspaper in 1994. She says she wrote the piece to empower youth through highlighting daily life activities they may be involved in.
“Ishpabazigwa’on! Gegoo giga-zegi’igosiin gegoo!” centers on McCoy’s late friend, who she described as an “avid skater and snowboarder.”
As an Ojibwe language learner, she revisited her writing and translated it with the same purpose — to empower youth and community through their interests.
“It shows our youth what we can do with our language,” McCoy said. “As we evolve, we can do everything from our own thinking in Ojibwe.”
When a call for contributors was announced, Khayman Goodsky says she was eager to submit a piece of her own — a photocollage of herself, family and friends all together enjoying the hobby of skateboarding.
Her son inspired her to submit the photocollage to the magazine. The two often enjoy the activity together, an interest she wanted to normalize for him. At the age of 10, he’s also learning Ojibwe at an immersion school.
“It might not be viewed as traditional, but the fact that we're still hanging out with our homies, to me, that's as traditional as it can get,” Goodsky said. “Our whole values is about family and community, and what better way to do that than to skateboard around town together.”
Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
