Barbara Nolan launches series of Anishinaabe language videos for children

Barbara Nolan's interest in teaching Anishinaabemowin has always been in passing the language on to children – and now she is bringing her passionate and vibrant approach to teaching children the language to the green screen.

People of all ages from across Turtle Island flocked to the Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig in Sault Ste. Marie over the weekend to see the launch of Nolan's first series of animated Anishinaabemowin videos for children. T-shirts featuring their Bitmoji – an emoji of Nolan that somehow captures Nolan's youthful enthusiasm – were extremely popular among the many well-wishers who came to see the highly anticipated launch of Nolan's latest language revitalization project.

After a number of chiefs and dignitaries spoke of Nolan's lasting influence in their opening remarks, the crowd caught their first glimpse of Nolan, dressed in various costumes, speaking none other than Anishinaabemowin in a series of children's videos, while animated animals and cartoon-like backgrounds helped bring her stories to life.

“There's an inner child in all of us that will enjoy this – and I've heard adults say, 'I'm going to check them out, they're so cool.' It's geared toward early childhood education and daycare,” Nolan said.

This project has been a long time coming: For years, Nolan felt she needed to produce animated videos for children to capture their interest. And it all finally came together after she met Esbikenh, a teacher at Anishinaabeg Kinomaagewgamig, a language immersion school in Bkejwanong (Walpole Island First Nation), during a conference last November.

After some conversation, Esbikenh told Nolan he could help her produce a series of children's videos in the language – for free. “I tried to pay him,” Nolan said.

Starting in January, Nolan traveled to the Sarnia area to record their stories.

“I really had a lot of fun,” Nolan said. “I told the videographer, 'I'm going to pretend the kids are here, OK?' And he said, 'Okay, do what you have to do.' So I pretended the kids were right here, talking to them and getting them excited.

“There's a green screen behind me – I don't know what he's going to put on it afterward, but he's going to put something in there that's related to the video. He did a great job.”

For Esbikenh, the project was a no-brainer: He suggested to his immersion school that Nolan come over and produce children's videos in the language, as there was a general lack of Anishinaabemowin resources for children.

“I said, why don't we get Barbara Nolan? She's one of the best storytellers – she's literally on a par with Robert Redford or Denzel Washington in terms of storytelling,” he said.

Esbikenh handled all the costumes and editing, while his brother handled the lighting. After designing the animatics – or, in layman's terms, an animated storyboard – Esbikenh sent everything to an animator.

Nolan's daughter, Colleen Nolan, handled the logistics so her mother could travel south from her home in the Garden River First Nation to record the children's videos. She was also instrumental in setting up a Tiktok account for her mother, who wanted to expand her reach to teach others the language.

“She sends me the written translation and we put in some subtitles so people get the gist of the story. Then we might highlight a word or two so that once people hear that word, they can keep absorbing it in little bursts,” Colleen said.

Nolan's daughter is now focusing on helping Nolan publish the videos and has set up a YouTube channel where all videos in children's languages ​​will eventually be uploaded.

Nolan's Bitmoji also played a role in marketing the videos, as shown by the animated image that was seen throughout the official launch event.

“When you look at it, you know who it is,” Colleen said. “I think it just makes people smile because they know them. It really brings out their character in that emoji.”

The first 10 full-length videos shown during the launch were funded by the Anishinabek Nation, a policy advocacy group for 39 First Nations in Ontario, where Nolan serves as language commissioner.

Garden River Child and Family Services has already agreed to fund the next ten Anishinaabemowin videos for children and plans to fund more in the future.

Nolan says her love of teaching children the language began years ago when she worked as a child and family counselor with the Huron Superior Catholic District School Board in Sault Ste. Marie.

In particular, the Anishinaabe children at the now-closed St. Hubert's Elementary School were reluctant to take French classes, which was reflected in their poor test results.

“I was chatting with the kids and that's when I realized they had no interest in French because they weren't French,” Nolan recalled. “One of the girls actually asked me – I think they had heard me speaking in that language with my mother-in-law – 'You speak the Anishinaabe language, why don't you teach us?' So the principal and I decided I should create a curriculum.”

Today, Nolan is busier teaching the language than when she was employed full-time. “My interest in the language was in the children — always, it was in the children,” Nolan said.

As she's honed her craft over the years, Nolan has learned how effective immersion can be in learning Anishinaabemowin, which isn't exactly the easiest language to learn. In her new videos, she now uses immersion to help children fully absorb and understand the language in a fun, yet focused way.

“I firmly believe that immersion is the way to save our language,” she said. “I encourage any multi-speaker community to use this method.”

The reason Nolan is trying so hard is heartbreaking: She considers herself lucky not to have lost her language during her four years at the Spanish Indian Residential School, where children were regularly punished by school administrators for speaking Anishinaabemowin.

However, Nolan was allowed to return home for Christmas and summer to the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, where her language was – and still is – widely spoken in the community. “We didn't lose contact with our families and it was spoken everywhere,” she said.

In one of the children's videos that premiered at the opening, Nolan talked about some of her experiences at boarding school.

“We really believe there's nothing in the school system that teaches them that, so we decided to make this special video. And it's my own story, you know? I was the one who went there,” Nolan said. “We were in that room and we were amazed at all these new things there – and then our parents walked away. Then we started crying.”

“That’s what I show in this video. Children need to know the history of boarding schools.”

Although some of the participants in the residential schools could speak and understand Anishinaabemowin, in many cases the language was not passed on to the next generation because they were traumatized by the punishment for speaking this language in the residential schools.

In her introduction to the residential schools episode, Nolan said she did this for all the residential school survivors who didn't have the heart to teach their children the language.

Nolan usually refers to the Anishinaabemowin students she mentors as “her children.” It’s pretty safe to assume that she may have a few more children now that videos of her children are circulating.

“I believe that if we want to survive as an Anishinaabe people, we have to speak our language. That is the only thing that holds us together,” Nolan said.