Ojibwe ‘Star Wars’ arrives in Minnesota theaters this week

Anyone who’s seen the original 1977 “Star Wars: A New Hope” can recognize the blaring brass fanfare of its iconic theme song.

But in a new version of the film, screening at Minnesota theaters this week, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s famous line, “Gi-ga-miinigoz Mamaandaawiziwin,” may not be as familiar as “May the Force be with you.”

The Ojibwe-language version of “Star Wars” recently debuted in Winnipeg, after several Canadian tribal and government groups worked with Disney/Lucasfilm to dub one of Hollywood’s most popular films into the endangered language.

Several of the film’s voice actors have local ties. Dustin Morrow, a University of Minnesota linguistics doctoral student, voiced Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anton Treuer, an author and professor of Ojibwe language at Bemidji State University, spoke lines for some stormtroopers and a loudspeaker announcement in the movie.

For Morrow, hearing his Ojibwe words synced up with the blockbuster he’s seen so many times on TV and VHS was surreal. “This is just such an awesome way to celebrate our Anishinaabe people,” he said.

Ojibwe, or Anishinaabemowin, is the second-most-popular Indigenous language in Canada, but Minnesota is home to the largest population of speakers in the United States.

Revitalization of Indigenous languages is a multipronged effort, involving everything from immersion preschools to apps. But mass media — especially pop culture icons like “Star Wars” — can be a powerful tool in broadening the language’s audience and keeping it relevant.

“I think we’re either going to get TV, Xbox, movies and streaming in our language, or we’re going to lose it,” said Treuer, who is a contributor to Strib Voices. “A language has to be available, not just for science or religion, or it will end up like Latin. It has to be for everything that people want to consume, for their business, daily living and entertainment. It’s a direction that we should be moving in if Ojibwe is going to turn the corner.”

Morrow grew up on his tribe’s reservation in northwest Wisconsin, as a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. Like many Ojibwe people, he learned English as his first language. His father’s mother, the family’s only first-speaker of Ojibwe, died when Morrow was 3 years old. “The extent of my language was basic words, like ‘no,’ ‘don’t’ or ‘sit down,’ ” he recalled.

As a child, Morrow took classes to learn basic vocabulary: Ojibwe words for animals, numbers and colors. Few people he knew spoke the language and Ojibwe media was hard to find — he only came across a few YouTube videos. “I only ever heard it spoken in ceremony and had never really heard it spoken conversationally,” he said.

As a young adult, Morrow was inspired to master the language after he encountered two fluent speakers engaged in conversation.

While Morrow improved his language skills as a college student, he didn’t become a conversational speaker until he came to study at the University of Minnesota a few years ago. Living in the campus’ newly created Ojibwe-immersion dorm helped a lot (his U classmate and dormmate Aandeg Muldrew plays Luke Skywalker) as did attending an immersion program on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation.

“Star Wars” was one of the many Ojibwe language revitalization projects Treuer has been involved with over the past decades. Early in the process of dubbing the movie, Treuer recorded speaking samples as templates for the audition process and helped with some of the script adaptation.

Translating “Star Wars,” which was led by Canadian Patricia Ningewance Nadeau, was a complex endeavor that involved creating new Ojibwe terms for fictional elements such as “lightsaber,” Treuer explained. But a language’s ability to evolve is a sign that it’s thriving, he added. “Any healthy, living language has the ability to expand its lexicon to cover new technologies, ideas and themes.”

Voice actors were chosen for a combination of speaking and acting ability. They recorded their parts in Winnipeg, a process Morrow described as being similar to karaoke, as the actors synced their lines to the film, which had the Ojibwe text running across the bottom. “You fit your dialogue into this narrow window and try and match the mouth movements as close as possible,” he explained.

In the studio, a small team of fluent speakers helped tweak the script on the fly, swapping words with synonyms or using a different dialect. Because Ojibwe is such a descriptive language, it can often take more syllables to express a thought, Treuer said. “Giving a full description exactly meaning-for-meaning ends up taking a little more space in Ojibwe, but you also want the cadence and timing of lines to land, so you have to make some decisions to line all of that up.”

Often, they stripped down the language to make lines fit. Or as one of Morrow’s Ojibwe professors used to say: “Not as much salt and pepper on the moose meat.”

Memorizing vocabulary can only take a language student so far, Morrow said. Listening to Ojibwe conversation — whether chitchat about the weather or plots to destroy the Death Star — helps those learning the language get more comfortable with understanding and speaking. “This is going to help people pick up some of the nuance,” he said of the film. “It’s great input for people to learn how to actually use the language.”

Morrow hopes the film will inspire people to learn Ojibwe. (“There are subtitles, but people will want to be able to watch this and understand it without using them.”)

But, more broadly, it can bring more recognition and respect to a community that has historically been treated as less than worthy of it. “Even people who haven’t ever done anything in the language can see a project like this and feel a sense of pride in their identity,” he said.

The dubbed movie was released in Canada earlier this month, but opens in U.S. theaters starting Friday.

Twin Cities:

Oakdale Cinema, 5677 N. Hadley Av., Oakdale.

Southbridge Crossing Cinema, 8380 Hansen Av., Shakopee.

Duluth: Duluth Cinema, 300 Harbor Drive, Duluth.

St. Cloud: Parkwood Cinema, 1533 Frontage Road N., Waite Park.

For additional information, see marcustheatres.com.

Ojibwe-language “Star Wars” will also be available on Disney+.