While Ojibwe is spoken across southern Canada and the Upper Midwest, the language is considered severely endangered. Since Minnesota is home to the greatest concentration of fluent Ojibwe speakers, the state has cultivated many revitalization efforts, including those of James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, 48, who lives in Apple Valley with his wife and son.
Vukelich Kaagegaabaw’s maternal grandmother was an enrolled member of North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, but he learned Ojibwe in college, as did many other descendants of his generation. As a social media personality, public speaker and podcaster, Vukelich Kaagegaabaw parses Ojibwe words to reveal how the culture’s values are embedded in its language and how ancient wisdom can be applied to modern problems.
Through his Ojibwe Word of the Day series, which has amassed more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube over the past decade, Vukelich Kaagegaabaw shares pronunciations and cultural context for terms such as ziigwan (“it is spring”) and miinibaashkiminasiganibiitooyingwesijiganibakwezhigan (“blueberry sauce that is put between two layers of bread that face each other,” a.k.a. “blueberry pie”).
One example, from his new book, "The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings," is the word indaanikoobijigan, meaning “my great-grandparent” or “my ancestors.” It contains the morpheme (a component of a word that carries meaning) aanik, a term Vukelich Kaagegaabaw translates as interconnected, which suggests each generation is linked to those before and after. The word indaanikoobijigan is also used for “my great grandchild,” he notes, reflecting the Ojibwe concept that we are, in some sense, quite literally our ancestors.
Neither your grandmother or your mother spoke Ojibwe growing up because they both attended residential schools. How did that impact your ability to learn the language? Part of the mission of those schools was, “Kill the Indian in order to save the man.” As I grew up and started to take courses at Minneapolis Community & Technical College, the University of Minnesota, and Fond du Lac Tribal College, I both got exposure to the language and understood why I hadn’t heard it.
What was your first impression of the language? I had studied French, some Italian, a little Latin, but never Ojibwe. I remember going to the bookstore and getting this book and opening it up and seeing some of these incredibly long words, like ishkwaa-manoominikewaad [“when they were done ricing”]. When you see it written in double vowel, it took up most of the page. I was like, Who uses a word this long? What does this word mean? I’ve got to figure this out. And that began the most exciting, fulfilling, intellectual, philosophical, linguistic, and spiritual journey. It was the first time I had heard this story about myself, a story I’d never been told.
What was it like recording elders speaking words for the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary?In some cases, we would talk about one word and the elder would say, “Okay, this word really means this. And the context that we used it in was during this ceremony.” And they would unpack it. Sometimes we would talk about one word for 10 to 20 minutes. So, I wasn’t just learning about the language, but the oral tradition and how language was literally carrying the culture. I began to realize that this is how a civilization with a really strong oral tradition can carry teachings on for generation after generation.
What was it like teaching Ojibwe to pre-kindergartners in Minneapolis Public School’s immersion program? Most of the time, the kids came in with little to no Ojibwe language. But by the end of the school year, so many of them were passively bilingual. You could speak to them in the language and they would get it. They were utterly fearless in repeating the language. They were miraculous little learning machines.