The poster had been on the wall all year.
Ojibwe greetings, printed in large text, laminated and taped up in the hall right outside the classroom door...aaniin ezhi-ayaayan? Hi, how are you? The students could read the words. Some of them could pronounce them. But reading a language and living it are different things.
I'd arrived at Netamisakomik Centre for Education in Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg to write a song and make a video with all the students in the school. The teacher pointed at the poster early on the first day. Students who had walked by it for months were suddenly gathered around trying to pronounce it correctly. On another poster around the corner was, Boozhoo Mino-Giizhigad, Hello, It's a Good Day.
We said: let's put them in the song.
How the Song Came Together
The students knew what they wanted to say. They wanted to greet each other. They wanted to talk about their day, their school, their community. We spent the first morning just listening to them talk, pulling phrases out of the conversation, finding the lines that had rhythm and feeling in them.
By the afternoon we had a verse. By the next day we had a chorus built around Boozhoo Mino-Giizhigad. Hello, it's a good day. Simple. Direct. True.
Ms Howell, the Grade 3 to 5 teacher, helped write the lyrics and guided us all with the pronunciation, making sure every syllable was right. The students recorded their parts. They heard themselves singing in their language...there was a tangible excitement in the room.
By the end of the week, the whole school was singing it at assembly.
What a Song Does That a Poster Can't
A poster stays on the wall. A song travels home in a student's head. It comes out in the kitchen when they're doing dishes. It gets hummed on the school bus. It gets sung at the next assembly and the one after that.
The repetition of a song is different from the repetition of a drill. It doesn't feel like learning. It feels like singing.
Boozhoo Mino-Giizhigad belongs to that school and that community now. It will be sung by students who weren't in that classroom, who weren't even born yet when we recorded it. That's what a song can do for a language that a lesson plan cannot.
If your school is looking for ways to bring traditional language to life for your students, we'd love to talk about what that could look like.