Dr. Christopher Hammerly started connecting more with his Ojibwe background as a 15-year-old. He fondly recalls making fry bread with his grandma.
“There’s a picture of me and her [making fry bread] together, and I love that picture … it was a really nice time,” Hammerly said.
Fry bread was created by Indigenous people in response to forced relocation from their homes to isolated reservations that were sparse in resources. Having lost traditional food sources, Indigenous people made the most of government rations and created fry bread, a dish symbolizing not only the perseverance of the Ojibwe people in the face of adversity, but also the losses endured due to colonization.
Just as fry bread served as a conduit for the Ojibwe bond amid trauma, this memory with his grandmother was a chance for Hammerly to bond with his family and learn about his culture.
Growing up outside of Indigenous reservations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Hammerly did not have many opportunities to learn the Ojibwe language — also known as Anishinaabemowin — or engage in his culture’s practices. To his knowledge, only one other person of Ojibwe ancestry attended high school with him, and the last people to speak the language in his family were his great grandparents.
Through residential schools, a genocide and a desensitization of the community to Indigenous culture, many young Indigenous people have been robbed of a culturally-involved upbringing.
Though he’s now an advocate for Indigenous language revitalization, Hammerly did not start his education knowing he wanted to study Ojibwe. As a student at the University of Minnesota, Hammerly aspired to study neuroscience and linguistics as a gateway to understanding human cognition. His experience inevitably provided him a path to further connect with his heritage.
Finding a new community
During his undergrad, Hammerly made many Ojibwe friends who were taking courses in the language, inspiring him to do so as well. This newfound community provided Hammerly with another platform to explore the language at a large scale for the first time in his life.
“At the University of Minnesota, it was a really comfortable community to be a part of … I just learned so much from everyone and everyone was so kind and welcoming,” he said.
Having had little exposure to the language, Hammerly studied it first as a learner, not a linguist. He cherished the chance to connect with his culture and language. He mentioned learning Ojibwe was crucial to “making myself whole, because it’s just a part of who I am.”
Hammerly started learning Ojibwe to fulfill personal goals and studied linguistics and cognition to pursue his professional interests. But by the end of his undergrad, he realized these seemingly separate interests could intermingle through academia and linguistic research, when he discovered the abundance of morphology and syntax literature in Ojibwe.
“I think a lot of people would expect that I would have been interested in the start in the language, … [but] I didn’t quite know how all these things fit together,” said Hammerly. “I was intellectually interested in language and personally interested in language revitalization, but those two have now met each other.”
"I was intellectually interested in language and personally interested in language revitalization, but those two have now met each other.”
Hammerly has now been exploring this intersection for the last 10 years. As he explained, conducting research, writing and thinking about Ojibwe in a linguistic framework provides him with a “playground to learn in,” and a space to connect with elders in the community with a common goal of understanding, learning and sharing the language.
“Learning a language is hard, but [it helps] if you can make it fun in different ways,” he said.
Building blocks for cultural revitalization
By creating tools to help new speakers, sharing his morphological understanding with language instructors and disseminating his research to improve the linguistic documentation of Ojibwe, Hammerly is contributing to the collaborative efforts required for Indigenous language revitalization.
As a linguist, Hammerly hopes to contribute to a formalized and detailed documentation of Ojibwe and to answer the question of what it means to know Ojibwe in a full way. This involves an in-depth analysis of syntax, morphology and verb conjugation.
Hammerly specializes in fieldwork and attempts to understand the intricacies of Ojibwe by speaking with elders, community leaders and language experts. He also teaches his approach as an assistant professor in the UBC department of linguistics, giving students more tools to study language.
He said he’s “worked a lot with speakers to understand how words get broken down” and how we can identify their right form.
Hammerly uses this knowledge both on a personal level, to become immersed in and continue to learn about Ojibwe culture, and on an academic level to apply theoretical linguistics to inform the literature on the language.
As part of a collaborative project, Hammerly is applying the knowledge gained from his fieldwork to design a finite-state transducer (FST) for morphological analysis.
The FST can take a complex word in Ojibwe and break it down to analyze its morphemes. This can be used to spell check, facilitate automated verb conjugation and can be integrated into online dictionaries. In the future, Hammerly hopes the FST will enable predictive text, similar to what is available on iMessage.
A vision for the future
Not having had the platform and community to learn Ojibwe as a child, Hammerly stresses that “getting children to speak the language again” is a foundational step for language revitalization.
Hammerly has taken this step in his personal life, with his one-year-old son.
“I speak as much as I know to him, … [and] he says things in the language,” Hammerly said.
He marvels at how his son is “the first one in the family, at [his] age, to be speaking this much Anishinaabemowin for generations.”
“That was taken away, and now it's coming back. So that's really special,” he said.
Hammerly also added that it is important for young individuals to speak Ojibwe on a large scale, expanding beyond ceremonious occasions to casual conversation.
He noted some of the progress that has already been made, for example in transcribing oral tradition into accessible books and dubbing popular media such as Star Wars into Ojibwe. However, much work remains to be done.
“People want to watch TV, they want to play a video game, … but it’s not possible to do a lot of that stuff right now in the language ... I think that emerges when people feel comfortable and supported.”
Language revitalization requires a unified effort, fulfilled by multiple roles. Hammerly finds his in providing an academic framework for understanding Ojibwe.
“People want to watch TV, they want to play a video game, … but it’s not possible to do a lot of that stuff right now in the language,” said Hammerly. “I think that emerges when people feel comfortable and supported.”
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