Waubgeshig Rice reflects on time spent highlighting Indigenous languages for Up North CBC

It's been a labour of love that spanned a couple of years and resulted in some very interesting conversations on the radio.

Former Up North CBC afternoon show host Waubgeshig Rice compiled a series of radio interviews, called Living Languages. It began as part of the International Year of Indigenous languages, declared by the United Nations last year. It continued into 2020 with conversations with people who are passionate about preserving and protecting these languages.

One of Rice's favourite interviews was with mothers who went back to giving their children Indigenous names.

"It was really cool just to hear them speak so passionately about their kids and why they wanted them to have names in Ojibwe," he said.

"We also spoke with Adrian Sutherland of the band Midnight Shine. They did a version of Neil Young's Heart of Gold with a verse in Cree."

He said the series also included insightful interviews with Greg Spence, a Cree teacher from a Moose Factory, who taught Up North listeners some words related to the changing seasons.

"Sudbury Ojibwe language teacher Dominic Beaudry was a regular feature as well," Rice said.

"It was just really fun to be able to learn different things every week and just put the spotlight on different people and their passion for their language."

'A long way to go'

One of the interviews in the series focused on an interview with Rice's brother, Mskwaankwad Rice.

"My brother has made it his life's work to reconnect with Anishinaabemowin while he was working in Ottawa. About a decade ago, [despite] having a good career in a nongovernment public service ... he decided he wanted to shift gears and learn his language properly," Rice said.

"So he quit his job in Ottawa and moved back to the reserve Wasauksing First Nation, where we're from, and spent time with my grandmother and some other elders. He's since gone on to postgraduate work, and is going to be doing his Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis."

Rice said his brother is really passionate about the language and his "go-to in a lot of ways when there's something that I want to learn."

The Up North CBC "Living Languages" series was an opportunity to help northern Ontario listeners to learn more about Anishinaabemowin, Rice said. And it's helped him grow his own understanding of the language as well.

"I obviously still have a long way to go to become fluent, but being a father is one of the great motivators and my wife is serious about this as well," he said.

"We want to raise our kids with their language more than we had. I've been taking courses at the University of Sudbury and I hope to continue that in the fall."

Rice said one of the reasons for moving away from his full-time career at CBC was to make more time for learning Anishinaabemowin.

He's also pursuing his career as an author, as he has been commissioned by Random House Canada to write a sequel to his novel Moon of the Crusted Snow.

Moon of the Crusted Snow depicts an apocalypse in a northern Anishinaabe community. With winter on the way and a sudden power outage, the community begins to unravel while strangers from the south, escaping their own chaos, arrive on the reserve's doorstep seeking refuge.

Read more about Up North CBC's Living Languages.