Nov. 8 -- CLOQUET -- For Michelle Goose, an Anishinaabe language instructor at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, land and the languages that developed on it are intertwined. You can't fully understand one without knowing the other.

"People that live on Indigenous land should know a little bit about the language to better understand the land that they live on," Goose said.

Goose, a member of the Leech Lake Nation who has spent 15 years preserving and teaching the Ojibwe language, said there are more than 100 words in the Ojibwe language for snow, as an example.

For her work in revitalizing her ancestral language, Goose was recently named a Bush Fellow by the Bush Foundation, a nonprofit that provides grants to people in Minnesota and the Dakotas working to improve their communities. Goose is receiving $150,000.

The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, published in 2010, lists the Ojibwe language as endangered. Though there has been a sizable effort to revitalize the language -- with widespread efforts such as the

interpretive cultural signage at Dunlap Island Park in Cloquet

-- Goose doesn't believe current efforts to normalize the language go far enough.

Goose plans to utilize her fellowship to design new coursework at the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College Anishinaabe Language program, as well as create an Ojibwe language textbook to be used in her classroom and available for others. She will travel, attend conferences and visit other Indigenous communities to observe efforts to revitalize their Indigenous languages.

Goose's work is typically limited to the classroom. She is now on a sabbatical, allowing her the time to share her work with the broader community, where she hopes to bring more awareness about the Ojibwe language and the challenges it faces.

This public outreach includes two events next week at the Cloquet Public Library. On Nov. 14 she will give a presentation on her work in preserving the Ojibwe language and on Nov. 16 she will host Ojibwe Storytime, where she will share Ojibwe language children's books and songs. She hopes to regularly present Ojibwe Storytime in the future.

The Ojibwe language has been threatened for centuries, Goose said, citing assimilation policies such as boarding schools, which often forbade Indigenous languages and thus hindered intergenerational passage of language.

Through all of that, the Ojibwe language continued to persevere with many Ojibwe people still speaking it as their first language, according to Goose. However, that generation of native speakers is rapidly aging.

"A lot of the speakers who grew up speaking Ojibwe like their first language, they're all like grandparent age, like 50 and over," she said. "And the numbers in that group of speakers are really dwindling fast."

That generational loss was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a severe impact on senior communities. Goose is now doing everything she can do to document the stories of people who speak Ojibwe as their first tongue while they are still living.

"It kind of feels like a race against time," she said.

With language comes an understanding of a culture that can't be properly conveyed through foreign languages like English, according to Goose.

"For a lot of Ojibwe people, it's part of who they are, part of a sense of identity. And being an Ojibwe person, language is a big part of that," she said.

There is a lot of shame in the Ojibwe community over not being able to speak Ojibwe due to a generational gap that prevented the language from being passed to younger generations, Goose said.

She grew up only understanding common Ojibwe words and phrases. She didn't become fluent until studying the language in college.

For Goose, learning her ancestral language brought a sense of healing and empowerment. She now hopes to share that with the wider community.

"Learning how to speak your language is a really empowering experience, and it's something that's really empowered me," she said.