SAULT STE. MARIE - Barbara Nolan’s interest in teaching Anishinaabemowin has always been deeply rooted in passing the language on to children — and now, she’s taking her passionate and animated way of teaching kids to the green screen.
People of all ages from across Turtle Island packed Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig in Sault Ste. Marie over the weekend to see the launch of Nolan’s first string of animated Anishinaabemowin videos geared towards children. T-shirts bearing her Bitmoji — an emoji of Nolan that somehow manages to capture Nolan’s youthful enthusiasm — were wildly popular among the many well wishers who came to see the much-anticipated introduction to 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 a variety of costumes, speaking nothing but Anishinaabemowin in a series of children’s videos as animated animals and cartoonish backdrops helped to bring her storytelling to life.
“There’s that inner child in each and every one of us that’s going to enjoy those — and I’ve heard adults say, ‘I’m going to watch those, those are so cool.’ It’s geared towards early learning plus daycares,” Nolan said.
This project has been a long time coming: For years, Nolan felt as though she should be producing animated videos for children in order to really pique their interest. And finally, it all started coming together after meeting Esbikenh, a teacher at Anishinaabeg Kinomaagewgamig, a language immersion school in Bkejwanong (Walpole Island First Nation), during a conference held this past November.
After spending some time talking, Esbikenh told Nolan that he could help her produce a series of children’s videos in the language — free of charge. “I’ve been trying to pay him,” Nolan said.
Beginning in January, Nolan would travel down to the Sarnia area to record her stories.
“I absolutely had lots of fun,” said Nolan. “I told the videographer, ‘I’m going to pretend the kids are here, okay?’ And he says, ‘okay, do whatever you have to do.’ So, I pretended I had the kids right there and I’m talking to them, and I’m getting them excited.
“There’s a green screen behind me — I don’t know what he’s going to put on there after, but he’s going to put something that’s related to that video. He did an amazing job.”
For Esbikenh, the project was a no-brainer: He suggested to his immersion school that Nolan come down to produce children’s videos in the language, citing a general lack of Anishinaabemowin resources for kids.
“I said, why don’t we get Barbara Nolan? She’s one of the best storytellers — she’s literally up there, storytelling-wise, with Robert Redford or Denzel Washington,” he said.
Esbikenh handled all of the costumes and editing, while his brother took care of the lighting. After coming up with the animatics — or in layman’s terms, an animated storyboard — Esbikenh would then send everything off to an animator.
Nolan’s daughter, Colleen Nolan, handled the logistics around her mother travelling down south from her home in Garden River First Nation in order to record the children’s videos. She was also instrumental in creating a Tiktok account for her mother, who wanted to expand her reach in terms of teaching others the language.
“She’ll send me the written translation, and we put some subtitles in there so people can get the gist of the story, and then maybe highlight a word or two, just so that people, once they hear that word, they can just continue to absorb in little spurts,” Colleen said.
Now, Nolan’s daughter has shifted her focus to helping Nolan to get the videos released, and has created a YouTube channel where all of the children's language videos will eventually be uploaded.
Nolan’s Bitmoji has also played a role in marketing the videos, as evidenced by the animated image appearing all throughout the official launch event.
“You look at it, and you know who it is,” Colleen said. “I think it just makes people smile, because they know her. It just really brings out her character in that emoji.”
The first 10 videos, which were shown in their entirety during the launch, were bankrolled by the Anishinabek Nation, a political advocacy group for 39 member First Nations in Ontario where Nolan serves as its language commissioner.
Garden River Child and Family Services is already on board to fund the next 10 children’s Anishinaabemowin videos, with plans to fund even more of them down the road.
Nolan says her love of teaching kids the language started years ago when she was a child and family counsellor with the Huron Superior Catholic District School Board in Sault Ste. Marie.
Anishinaabe children at the now-defunct St. Hubert’s Elementary School in particular didn’t like taking French language classes, and their abysmal test scores reflected that.
“I would chit chat with the kids, and that’s when I found out they weren’t interested in French, because they weren’t French people,” Nolan recalled. “One of the girls actually did ask me — I guess they had heard me talk to my mother-in-law in the language — ‘you speak the Anishinaabe language, why don’t you teach us?’ So, the principal and I decided that I should do a curriculum.”
Now, Nolan is busier teaching the language than when she was employed full time. “My interest in the language was for the kids — all the time, it’s for the kids,” Nolan said.
In honing her craft, Nolan has learned over the years just how effective immersion can be in learning Anishinaabemowin, which isn’t exactly the easiest language to learn. She’s now applying immersion in her new videos in order to help kids fully absorb and understand the language in a fun, yet purposeful way.
“I truly believe immersion is the way to go to save our language,” she said. “I encourage any community that has a number of speakers to utilize that method.”
The reason why Nolan goes the extra mile is a gut wrenching one: She considers herself lucky that she didn’t lose her language during four years spent at Spanish Indian Residential School, where children were routinely punished by administrators for speaking Anishinaabemowin.
But Nolan was still permitted to go back home to Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island at Christmas time and during the summer, where her language was — and still is — prevalent in the community. “We didn’t lose connection with our families, and it was spoken all over the place,” she said.
Nolan recounted some of her experience in residential school in one of the children’s videos that premiered during the launch.
“We really believe there’s nothing in the school system that teaches them about that, so we decided to do that particular video. And it’s my own story, you know? I was the one that went there,” said Nolan. “We were in this room, and we were amazed at all these new things in there — and then, our parents slipped away. Then we started crying.
“So, I show that in that video. Kids have to know the story about residential schools.”
Although some who attended residential school could speak and understand Anishinaabemowin, it wasn’t passed down to the next generation, in many cases, because of the traumas associated with being punished for speaking it in residential school.
In introducing the residential school episode, Nolan said she did it for all the residential school survivors who couldn’t bring themselves to pass on the language to their kids.
Nolan usually refers to Anishinaabemowin students under her tutelage as ‘her kids.’ It’s fairly safe to assume that she may have a few more kids now that her children’s videos are out there.
“I think if we are to survive as Anishinaabe people, we have to be speaking our language. That’s the one thing that holds us together,” Nolan said.
