Nim-bii-go-nini Ojibwe Language Revitalization Strategy: Families Learning Our Language at Home

The Nim-bii-go-nini Ojibwe Language Revitalization Strategy is a grassroots approach to language learning that has been in collaborative development and implementation with my family since 2008. Nim-bii-go-nini is two words: Nim-bii-go, commonly pronounced Nipigon, and Nini, meaning people. We are Lake Nipigon Ojibwe people. This strategy is one response to some of the negative intergenerational impacts that the Canadian Residential Schools have on Aboriginal families. We have incorporated the Ojibwe medicine wheel into an Eight Cycle Process with Basic and Assessment Processes that help us to organize and develop our language learning plan. This study describes how my family began to renew our familial relationships and rebuild our cultural foundation so that intergenerational knowledge sharing could fully occur; without this the initial stages of the revitalization of our language could not have taken place. This study demonstrates more than a reversal of the colonizing homogenized Euro Western education imposed on us, it is an example of a grassroots effort to rebuild the frayed social fabric of our Indigenous societies through families coming together to learn their language.