Anishinaabemowin Language of Kettle and Stony Point
[1] Kettle and Stony Point is located in Canada, in the province of Ontario and in the municipality of Lambton County.
Once such variation is Potawadami that belongs to the Central Algonquian language family located in Kettle and Stony Point.
[3] Other name and spelling variation for the language spoken in Kettle and Stony point are Ojibway, Ojibwe or Ojibwa.
[7] There are a multitude of factors that have contributed to the endangered status of the Anishinaabemowin language in Kettle and Stony Point.
When both the French and the English colonies conquered the continent of North America, government policies were erected to deal with the “Indian problem”.
[9] These policies were created in the attempt to force assimilation of the Indigenous people into the newly established dominant culture and language.
[8] This forced assimilation required that both Indigenous children and adults be only taught and speak the dominant language of English.
[8] Indigenous people seeking employment and economic gain in Canada experience this problem everyday and it is a contributing factor to the state of the language use in Kettle and Stony Point.
[11] Creating a drastic decline in the number of fluent speakers in the community, as future children would have been raised to not value their heritage language.
[12] Instead the language was assigned a rating of 2 because the youngest fluent speaker was determined to be in their fifties fitting into the grandparent generation.
[12] The rating for the Anishinaabemowin language of Kettle and Stony Point in accordance with UNESCO factor 3 is 1, critically endangered.
Allocating the rating of 1, critically endangered because very few people in Kettle and Stony Point speak the language.
[12] In accordance with this grading scale, the language of Anishinaabemowin in Kettle and Stony Point has been assessed with the rating of 4, differentiated support.
[12] With the possibility of an argument being made for critically endangered status, with the chance of dormancy in the next generation if revitalization does not work.
[12] Kettle and Stony Point First Nation Reserve has both short-term and long-term plans for language revitalization of Anishinaabemowin.
[18] The Unity Gathering is an annual event that is intended to bring the people of the community together to share, teach and celebrate their culture.
[18] The Storytelling program is composed of events that are held in the hopes of passing on the traditions of Oral History and sharing.
[8] There are several long-term language revitalization plans for Anishinaabemowin in place at Kettle and Stony Point First Nations.
[18] The first long-term plan established was the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point Head Start Day Care.
[19] The program statement for the daycare states that it was “committed to moving forward in reclaiming of the Ojibway language and providing optimal growth in all areas of the developmental stages”.
[1] There is an online pilot program that is designed for daily language learning and practice called Anishinaabemowin Everyday.
[21] The teaching methods utilized by this program are podcasts, flashcards, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, drag-and-drop, and quizzes.
[21] The options of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, drag-and-drop and quizzes help the learner to test their knowledge and skills in the language.
[21] These two examples of some of the online resources available highlight Andras Knori's argument of the importance of the web to language revitalization.
