By Justin Neely, CPN Language Department Director
Bozho, jayek (Hello, everyone),
It’s been a busy time in the language department. On April 29 we had our first community game night. We played the traditional game of Gwzegegen (dice and bowl). We had a great turn out of over 40 people. It was raining that day, so we were happy to have such a great turnout.
By the time this comes out, Shelly Watson will have finished her six-week beginner course. Her classes are online at the Hownikan YouTube page if you would like to check them out. We just recently wrapped up the eighth year of our high school language course. Over the years we have partnered with a number of districts, including Wanette, Maud, Seminole, Shawnee, Tecumseh and Shawnee Middle School. This year we had students in Shawnee, Tecumseh and added North Rock Creek. We are able to offer the course anywhere in Oklahoma for world language credit. So if you have a student who would like to take the course in Oklahoma, let us know. We would need to set it up with the local school board/superintendent so that it would be ready to go hopefully by fall.
Starting May 19 we are beginning our Master Apprentice eight-week summer program. We have gotten quite a bit of interest this year. This will be our third year of doing this program. Each year previously we averaged 10-11 people who came the entire eight weeks, as well as some who came for a week or two depending on their schedule. This year we are expecting 10-15 folks who will be with us.
We are also getting ready for Festival. We will be doing our Potawatomi Bingo on Friday and Saturday. We will also have a children’s class and an adult class.
We have a number of tools available for learning the language. We have a course at learning.potawatomi.org. This course has a number of class options, including a course for middle school, introduction course, grammar-based course and a children’s course. We also have an online dictionary at potawatomidictionary.com. It has over 10,000 words with 90 percent having audio files. We are constantly updating and adding to our dictionary, whether it be example sentences, audio files, images or ways of printing it out. You can print Potawatomi to English or English to Potawatomi and there is no cost to do so. You can also go to the tags section and look up words by categories, such as mammals, birds, weather, types of verbs, etc. There is now an option to print the tags version as well. Big shoutout to our IT team for helping us develop a very useful tool for our people. We have a course on memrise.com at community-courses.memrise.com, which was recently moved to their community pages. The courses are called “A Day in the Life” and “Conversational Potawatomi.”
Our newest endeavor is a course on 7,000 Languages. It’s at 7000.org. You have to create an account and then click on Potawatomi. This course is really cool. It’s based mostly on listening and comprehension. Each section is based on a room of the house (so the kitchen, bathroom, living room, entryway, bedroom, dining room) and then goes out to the community with going to the doctor, eating out, etc. The course is all phrase-based and conversational. There is no grammar and no individual words. The idea is to give people day-to-day phrases to use. This new course is really cool so go check it out. You won’t be disappointed. I believe it will be a game changer.