Indigenous Next Door Ep I: Maggie & Ojibwe

Although a blog in essence itself is self-promotion, I am going to indulge a bit more today. Firstly, I am announcing Expat-terns' Youtube page and secondly, I am going to try to entice y'all to visit it with my first video in a potential series: Indigenous Next Door.

As a part of my FNEL 380 (Technologies for Endangered Language Documentation and Revitalization) course mini-project at UBC, I created (and most likely will continue to create) some webisodes/mini-language tutorials centering around individual's indigenous language(s) and experiences at university. Each episode also features different linguistic topics like morphology and creolization. Those two aspects come to mind they are the focuses of my first two videos with Maggie and Kaidie.


The idea for Indigenous Next Door came after a discussion with the aforementioned Kaidie. I had no idea what to do for this quite open-ended project, for I do not have a connection with an indigenous community like many of the others students in my course or the linguistic know-how to do anything else. For these reasons, I decided to make videos since that is all young people can do it seems ...

Indigenous Next Door came to be because I learned about the languages of Dominica (not the Dominican Republic), the Kalinago people, and the national and indigenous relations on the island from Kai (who lives a few doors down) that I would never have known without asking the initial question: Do you speak any indigenous languages? Later, Kai put me in contact with Maggie who is Ojibwe, and the series was born with its first video. I will post Kaidie's later after some more editing. Ironically, we filmed her video second.

Stories like these are close by, maybe even a door down. I hope when people listen and watch these videos, it brings up questions: Where are indigenous languages? Where are they spoken? What land am I on now? And the overarching, why is it so?

I will be making more travel based videos as well. You can expect at least some from Rwanda and Israel. This potential series is just one of many different types of videos I hope Expatterns can produce. My videography skills are not amazing, but I am getting better. As I make more, the more sophisticated they will become too. Have no worries; your ears and eyes will not be forever strained.

Featuring the Musqueam acknowledgement is crucial for any work here at UBC. We are on their land. I am excited to take their language class next year; however, I will not be able to share much as a result of understandable protocol agreements. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to take classes on a reserve and also drive again. Well, maybe drive. We will see if I can get my hands on a car - I may just carpool. Anyway, it is almost the end of the school year; my first year of university is almost over! And soon, we are going to Rwanda and Israel! In short, prepare yourselves. We have a lot on the horizon.

Labels: , , , , ,

.