Our next Casual Conversation, on Wednesday, October 9 at 5 pm Eastern will be an occasion to spend time with our Dartmouth 1969 classmate, Brian Maracle, who comes to us courtesy of the good offices of classmate Ron Tally.
Brian, also known as Owennatekha, will speak with us primarily about his life’s work in preserving and teaching the Mohawk language. He is a member of the Mohawk First Nation and was raised on the Six Nations Grand River Territory Reserve until he was five. He then moved with his family to upstate New York.
His career in Canada included his work as a writer for the Globe and Mail, and as a host of a radio show on the CBC covering issues involving Indigenous people. Here is part of an entry on Brian from the Canadian Encyclopedia, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/brian-maracle :
After Maracle moved back to his reserve, he began to learn the Mohawk language and, with his wife Audrey, established a full-time adult immersion language school, Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa, in 1998. Maracle eventually all but abandoned his writing career to devote himself to revitalizing the Mohawk language, employing his skills to host a radio program called Tewatonhwehsen! (Let’s have a good time!) and writing a blog in Mohawk.
Further to the interest in his extraordinary career, this time by United States media, Brian was the subject of a New York Times profile on April 22, 2023, titled “Unlocking the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of a Dying Language: A member of Canada’s Mohawk community devised a new method to teach an Indigenous language on the brink of extinction.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/world/canada/indigenous-languages-mohawk-canada.html?searchResultPosition=1 .
As the Times reports:
“. . . Mr. Maracle has become a champion of Mohawk, and is helping revive it and other Indigenous languages, both in Canada and elsewhere, through his transformation of teaching methods.
“‘I never studied linguistics, don’t have any teacher training, my parents weren’t speakers,’ he said in his office at an adult language school he founded about two decades ago in his community, the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, southwest of Toronto. Yet, linguistics academic conferences now feature him as a speaker.”
We will also have the opportunity to explore with Brian what it was like to be an Indigenous person at Dartmouth while we were there. He does not, to put it mildly, have an easy relationship with the College . Perhaps we can use Brian’s own words, as quoted by Dartmouth graduate Maeve Fairbanks in her essay available online, https://maevefairbanks.com/writings/an-awful-awful-unnatural-experience :
I just wanted to keep my head down and get through it. Indians on campus, we were nothing. I don’t think young people today have an understanding or an appreciation of how things have changed. I don’t think people understand they can subtract all of the Native things that are at Dartmouth now, then subtract all of those Native people, and you change the entire landscape. There were no women when I went there, even. It was just an awful, awful, unnatural thing to have that experience. It wasn’t life. It was just something to get through – to survive. The things that I do now – the way I lead my life now – have no relation to the school. In spite of all of its best intentions, I get the sense that Dartmouth still doesn’t have anything to do with what I value in life.
But Brian did survive, and he has thrived. He can tell us about his journey, from the isolation and rejections at Dartmouth to his work in bringing the Mohawk language to new generations of his First Nation. Will you be there to listen? If you want to, please let me know by close of business this Monday, October 7 at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Tewatonhwehsen!
Arthur Fergenson