By Justin Neely, CPN Language Department Director
Bozho, Jayek (Hello, everyone),
Ni je na? (How are you?)
On Feb. 4, we had our annual Winter Story Telling event, which drew a nice crowd both in person and online. There are certain stories, particularly those involving Wiske or Nanabozho the trickster, which can only be shared in the winter. We believe traditionally that in the winter the earth and the spirits are asleep. The snow covering the earth is like a waboyan (blanket). In Oklahoma it can be challenging to find a time where there is snow on the ground, so we do the best we can by adhering to the timeframe of winter. A recording of the event may be viewed on our YouTube channel at cpn.news/winterstorytelling until about March 18. Once you learn some of these stories, share them with your children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and cousins. But remember to only tell these in the winter.
We are into our second semester with our online school course with students in Tecumseh, Shawnee and North Rock Creek. The course is available anywhere in the state of Oklahoma for world language credit. So, if you have a student interested, let us know. It will take a little work to get it approved through your school board and then implemented at the school. It shouldn’t take too much time to get this done, but we wouldn’t want to wait until the last minute.
We are already in the planning stages for our summer immersion course. For the last three years we have been doing an eight-week immersive course for anyone interested in attending. We have had folks join us from all over the country to participate. One thing we realize is it’s difficult for most people to be gone from home for more than two weeks. Bills need paid and animals/plants taken care of. With this understanding, we are revamping the course to make it available in two-week blocks. The beginner immersion course will run Monday through Friday, May 11-May 22. The intermediate course will run June 1-June 12. We are also adding a children’s course, which will incorporate cultural activities with language, that will run July 6-July 10. We have yet to set the age requirement, but I would guess 6-14. Please contact us if you are interested in any of these summer courses.
At the Winter Story Telling event, we announced our next in-person/online course offerings. This time we will have a beginner course but also an intermediate/advanced course. Please remember to use the many resources we have developed for self-learning. We have a number of courses at learning.potawatomi.org. We also have a great course at 7000.org. This course is designed with rooms of the house and everyday words to use around the house. There is also an online dictionary with over 10,000 words with audio. The dictionary can be printed out from the site as well. We also have a number of Quizlet sets for folks to drill themselves on. One particularly fun one is VTA verbs with audio. You listen to the card to know if you know the words. We also have started consolidating our two YouTube channels into one, which is also where we are putting new content. It is located at youtube.com/@cpnlanguage. We add new content on a weekly basis, so make sure to check those out.
To see some of resources, check out this video we made at cpn.news/7000tutorial.