tânisi kahkiyaw/hello everyone, Chelsea Vowel nitisiyîhkâson/my name is Chelsea Vowel. tawâw/welcome!
I am Métis from manitow-sâkahikan/Lac Ste. Anne, and my nêhiyawêwin/Cree language learning journey truly began when I had my first child in 2002. I had wanted to reclaim my language before then, but becoming a parent added urgency – I felt a deep responsibility to raise my children fluent in our language. At that point I had a Bachelor of Education and was teaching at the elementary and high-school level. I gathered as many language resources together as I could, feeling that my training would allow me to learn on my own, but kî-âyiman/it was hard! Working full-time, raising a baby and then having my second child in 2004, I often felt that I was failing myself, my children, and my community when my language skills did not progress very quickly.
I went back to school in 2006 to complete a Bachelor of Laws, and it was then I had the amazing fortune to study nêhiyawêwin formally under Dorothy Thunder at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. This was the first time I had access to a complete grammar-based nêhiyawêwin course with a mother-tongue speaker and peers to practice with. Although my fluency increased exponentially during this time, I realized that there was still so much left to learn. For this reason, I will always think of myself as a second-language nêhiyawêwin/Cree language learner.
Nonetheless, I left the course with the tools I needed to continue learning on my own, and as soon as I could, I began sharing what I’d learned with others. From 2009-2016 I lived in Montreal, and in my spare time I taught nêhiyawêwin/Cree community classes for nêhiyawak and Métis prairie-expats.
In 2016, I returned to my home territory to begin a Masters of Native Studies. I also began the job of my dreams – teaching nêhiyawêwin/Cree at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta alongside Nicole Lugosi-Schimpf and my mentor, Dorothy Thunder. For the next eight years I had the privilege of immersing myself in nêhiyawêwin/Cree instruction (and constant learning) as well as teaching Indigenous Studies to hundreds of students.
Throughout all this time, I never forgot how daunting it was to try to reclaim a language alone, without materials that could guide me through my learning journey in a systematic way. I constantly encountered people who asked where they could take nêhiyawêwin/Cree classes. The classes I taught were restricted to post-secondary students, and I was teaching eight 3 credit courses per academic year, meaning I had nothing left in the tank at the end of the day to teach outside the academy. Every nêhiyawêwin/Cree instructor I know is stretched to their limits, doing as much as they can to spread their knowledge, but they are an extremely finite resource. People even bought the textbooks we used in our courses, but without an instructor, few were finding language learning success.
I kept a list to share of every other nêhiyawêwin/Cree learning opportunity I could find, but found that many potential learners couldn’t make it to in-person classes, had a schedule that meant they couldn’t commit to live online offerings, or couldn’t afford the classes that weren’t free. For years, many of us worked to convince the university to commit to creating an online, asynchronous (work at your own pace) nêhiyawêwin/Cree course that would be free to the public. The academy has vast resources, and a stated commitment to reconciliation – what better way to engage relationally with communities than to wield those resources in a way that would support comprehensive language reclamation? But after eight years, it became apparent that the university didn’t see it this way. I couldn’t continue to work there and wait, and hope that eventually we’d change the minds of administration.
This realization, along with others during my time in the academy, led to the worst burn-out I’ve ever experienced. I had believed that being a professor of Indigenous Studies is the most well-paying and stable position I’ve ever held would finally allow me to complete the project I have spent over twenty years trying to get off the ground – a complete nêhiyawêwin/Cree, offered free-of-cost to learners. Instead, the workload and stress made me less capable of fulfilling my responsibilities to my children, and communities.
I support a family of six, so quitting my job at the university was pretty terrifying. I need to make a living somehow, but we need to knock down as many barriers to Indigenous language reclamation as possible, and a fundamental principle of this project is that the end result remain free-of-cost to learners. In order to feed and house my family as I develop these resources, I am relying on grants from organizations with a mandate to support this sort of work. This means it will still take some time to get a full course up and running, but I still believe it will happen sooner than waiting for someone to do it for us.
In the meantime, please use and enjoy the materials as they become available, and together kiskinwahamâkositân/let’s learn nêhiyawêwin/Cree!