Pat Ningewance, an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba, has been teaching her language, Ojibwe, for 40 years. But for her students, it’s not easy to learn.
“There’s always a block there for them,” she says. “The non-native students in my classroom, they don’t seem to have that problem. They can pronounce the words — to them, it’s a subject, you know, they don’t have any emotional baggage.”
That “block” was the subject of a recent summit at the university, where speakers from multiple nations came together to discuss the difficulty of both learning and teaching their languages. Ningewance says generations of inherited trauma or shame, caused by racism and residential schools, make it difficult for Indigenous learners to get the words out.
