Fanshawe launching Anishinaabemowin immersion program

When Monty McGahey II was ten, his dad gave him a cassette tape and learning booklet filled with Anishinaabemowin words, hoping his son might invest time in the language neither of them spoke. 

"I was motivated to learn but had nobody to speak the language with," said McGahey, who grew up on Chippewas of the Thames First Nation, southwest of London, Ont. It set him on the path to reclaim his language. Now, thirty years later, he's a faculty member for Fanshawe College's first-ever Anishinaabemowin language program, launching this fall. 

For McGahey, it's more than a two-year diploma program — it's an urgently-needed transmission of language and culture. 

"Our community, Chippewas of the Thames, we don't have any speakers who are from our community left, living," McGahey said. 

Fanshawe's immersive program will take place at Chippewas of the Thames First Nation, and includes a sixty-hour practicum. According the website, the program's name, Paswe'aatigook, means "echoing amongst the trees" in Anishinaabemowin. 

The Chippewa program follows the launch of Fanshawe's three-year Oneida language advanced diploma, which started in 2021. The first round of students will graduate from the program this fall, said coordinator Nancy George.

McGahey said he didn't get language lessons in high school, because there was no teacher. 

"Me not knowing the history of Canada and ourselves, I would hear kids from other nations and races, like Polish, Arabic and Chinese," he said. "I'd hear other kids my age speaking to each other in their language and I'd be kind of jealous, like 'Why why are they speaking and we're not able to do that?'" 

After graduating from university, McGahey enrolled in a language program at Sioux College in 2007.

"That's kind of what started me off," he said. When he returned home to Chippewa, he taught community language classes.  From 2010 to 2014, he studied in an adult program on Walpole Island First Nation. 

"We're hoping people will be inspired to be teachers. At the same time, we just need people speaking. People that are willing to speak to their children at home and, hopefully, we can have transmission of the language in that way as well." 

Most of the speakers learned English first and Anishinaabemowin second, like himself, or are teachers from other communities who, for one reason or another, now live in the community and help to teach, he said. 

McGahey's mother is from Oneida Nation of the Thames and his father is from Chippewas of the Thames.  Though his grandparents spoke the language, they didn't pass it along. 

"That generation is where a lot of it stopped," he said. "Due to residential school and people thinking that we didn't need our language — they needed their kids to speak English to excel in this society. "