This northern Ontario school board will be offering Ojibwe courses online

Starting in January 2025, the Near North District School Board will offer high school students across Ontario the chance to earn upper-level Ojibwe language credits online. 

These virtual courses will be available to students province wide through the Ontario eLearning Consortium. According to the school board, the program aims to address challenges related to timetable conflicts and low enrolment, which previously hindered access to upper-level Ojibwe language classes.

Falcon McLeod, who has experience teaching Level C and D Ojibwe classes in person, will teach the courses.

"I think it's really important because we are losing a lot of speakers at an exponential rate and we're not creating enough speakers to reverse that. When I was growing up, I had always heard from elders and a lot of important Indigenous figures that our culture is embedded within our language," said McLeod, explaining the course aims to promote Indigenous language revitalization and provide greater access to cultural education.

"We have to maintain our language in order to maintain our culture, in order to maintain our identity as Indigenous people of Turtle Island, Canada and North America."

McLeod says students will focus on one grammar concept each week. Each lesson includes a pre-recorded video of the in-class session available on YouTube, a worksheet, and audio files of McLeod speaking Ojibwe, which students will transcribe and translate.

"For example, first week we introduce a set of nouns to be the actors for our sentences. The next week we have those same nouns doing actions and that's how we introduce verbs," McLeod said. 

"From there we introduce commands, then prepositional phrases, etc. Within about four lessons we've gone from no language knowledge to nearly story-telling abilities in Ojibwe."

Students across Ontario interested in registering for the courses can do so through their school guidance departments.

Sarah Spence, the principal of student achievement and well-being at the school board, says the courses are designed to address the calls to action related to language and advance Truth and Reconciliation.

"The board is situated on the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory, specifically on the lands of seven Anishinaabe First Nations. We are honoured to have exceptional language holders who can offer such calibre of language teachings," said Spence in the school board's press release.