Anton Treuer's Quest to Revive the Ojibwe Language

Anton Treuer thinks the solutions to many of America’s most challenging problems lie in understanding a language that, until recently, only a few people on the planet still spoke.

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Everyone knows native Hawaiian for hello—aloha! You go to Paris for a week and you figure out hello in the native language there, too—bonjour! So how is it that plenty of people live in Minnesota for generations and never figure out Ojibwe for hello? (It is boozhoo—rhymes with Peugeot). That is tragic, as people in Minnesota were greeting each other in Ojibwe long before our English “hello” ever arrived here. 

While few non-Ojibwe folk know “boozhoo,” there is plenty of Ojibwe we all know. Moose, for instance. Or chickadee, muskellunge, moccasin, and totem. And then there’s Ojibwe place names like Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. (Minnesota is Dakota.) 

The seeming pervasiveness of a language in which many don’t know how to say hello raises the question of how it came to be obscured in the first place. 

Anton Treuer has the answer to that. And he also thinks that the broader population having a better understanding of Ojibwe just might be the key to solving a lot of America’s seemingly logjammed culture wars. That’s why he’s part of a group supporting an Indigenous studies requirement at Bemidji State University, where he’s a professor, and why he thinks Indigenous studies should be taught statewide in K–12 schools. 

“The British developed our curriculum systems,” Treuer explains over the phone from his family land near Bemidji. “And no one realizes we’re still using them. Every kid in Minnesota knows a zebra, from British colonies in Africa, but how many know a mink?” 

He’s right, of course. Most folks know these fierce, semiaquatic mammals that are native to the state not from their slinky, murderous life in the wild but from their after-death role in winter coats.

It wasn’t until after college that Treuer himself learned Ojibwe in earnest, but he soon became one of the world’s foremost Ojibwe scholars. In addition to his professorship at Bemidji State, he is the author of The Language Warrior’s Manifesto, Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask, and a bevy of other Ojibwe-oriented works. 

“Growing up in Bemidji, I had a lot of really visceral experiences with overt racism,” Treuer says before describing being assaulted as a child for being Indian—a word Treuer uses deliberately, despite its origins with Christopher Columbus. 

When asked why he prefers a term many Natives long ago disposed of, he cites Sherman Alexie, who wrote: “The white man tried to take our land, our sovereignty, and our languages. And he gave us the word ‘Indian.’ Now he wants to take the word ‘Indian’ away from us too. Well, he can’t have it.” 

The racial violence of Treuer’s youth mirrored the experiences of his father, Robert, who was beaten and chased through the streets of Vienna for being Jewish before ultimately escaping the Holocaust and making his way to Bemidji. To Treuer, it felt like racism couldn’t be combated, only fled.

“By the time I finished high school, I was like, ‘I want to get out of dodge and never come back,’” he says. “I was probably the first Ojibwe person to go to Princeton.” 

Yet distance only strengthened the bond with his homeland, on which the Ojibwe, who were led from the East Coast by prophecy, have lived for a thousand years. By the time he graduated, he just wanted to immerse himself in Ojibwe language and culture and “never leave.”

So he never left. Treuer returned and apprenticed with Archie Mosay, an Ojibwe language speaker born in 1901. With Mosay, one of the few remaining speakers who grew up in a community where everyone spoke Ojibwe, Treuer learned things about culture and meaning-making that only the language itself could teach. For instance, in English we say “old woman,” and the implication is that “old” is a deviation from the standard. But in Ojibwe, a female elder is “mindimooye,” which means “one who holds us together.” 

At the same time Treuer was learning more about his own roots, he was helping plant a new generation’s roots. He moved onto the 500 acres of farmland near Bemidji that his father bought in 1958 and continued the stewardship his father had begun of planting trees on the vast acreage. Then he fell in love with a fabric artist—“of the Swedish tribe,” Treuer says—named Blair. When they married, Treuer brought seven children, and before long they added two more. Every time Treuer’s father, Robert, who passed away in 2016, welcomed a new child or grandchild into the world, he’d exclaim, “Another victory against Hitler!” Robert, like Anton, had children before marrying Anton’s mother. When you factor in the children of Anton’s three younger siblings, one of whom is novelist David Treuer, Robert Treuer of Vienna has now won quite a few victories against Hitler in Ojibwe country.

As Anton Treuer grew his family, he also grew more confident in his mastery of Ojibwe and, in doing so, became convinced that understanding Ojibwe would be beneficial for more than just Ojibwe people. 

“Today, you see this constant fight about who gets to be the oppressor and who has to be the oppressed,” Treuer says. “For all of American history, white folk have been the beneficiaries of unearned advantage just by being white—living longer, safer, less interfered with by police. Now, as people of color are starting to rise, some—not all—white folk are really worried we are going to flip the roles of who is the oppressor and who is oppressed. The response is to fight to preserve this basket of unearned privileges. So: preventing access to voting. Requiring addresses on voter IDs when all North Dakota Indians on reservations don’t have addresses. But the thing is, it doesn’t have to be oppressor and oppressed. There are other options.” 

Those other options, however, are only made visible through other perspectives. Just as the Founding Fathers were inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy (founded as early as 1142) to envision a way for states and a federal system to work together for a more responsive democracy, Treuer thinks that Ojibwe ideas could get Minnesotans past a system that relies on oppressors and oppressed. 

“When you look at the history of humans, only ten thousand years ago, everywhere, we were all pretty communal and village focused,” Treuer says. “Only after we became agricultural and figured out how to lock up food and accumulate wealth did we find new forms of oppression. This way of structuring violence and power, it was perfected in Europe, where white folks were doing this to each other for thousands of years before they took it to the rest of the world. It’s really good at extracting resources, but it’s not so good for anything else. We’ve become so steeped in individualism, materialism, and competition that we’re now left with a world where all human beings need healing.”

And it’s the healing part in which Treuer sees Ojibwe being particularly helpful. “I am definitely not saying, ‘Find the nearest Native culture and appropriate it,’” he says. “But we are talking about Minnesota. If I moved to Germany, I’d find myself rude if I didn’t learn something about German history and at least a little German. Every square inch of land in Minnesota is Indigenous land, and all people who live here should know at least something about it. Everyone should know about their neighbors, the people they live with and work with and might marry. It’s fundamental to being a successful human, that ability to see other perspectives.” 

And the fundamental way we can get Americans to learn about something? Get it into the curriculum. It would be good, says Treuer, to learn a little Ojibwe language and the names of the other animals in our forests. We’d learn the directions and qualities of the rivers and the watershed geography that makes them so. We’d learn about native plants, about wild rice, about what wild rice needs to grow. (Hint: It’s not pollution.) And we’d learn how to manage ecosystems so that they could be balanced and productive for a thousand years. 

Putting Ojibwe culture into every Minnesota kid’s curriculum would likely be a fight, admits Treuer, but it’s a fight worth fighting. 

“Fundamentally, what we don’t know does hurt us,” he says. “And keeps us divided. And endangers all good things that Americans really do. The benefits of living in truth are not just benefits for Indigenous people. Violence, ugly chapters of history, they dehumanize all of us—victims, perpetrators, all of us. There’s no way to change what happened in history, but we can change what we do with it next. We can write a new, brighter, happier chapter—or we can be passive and let oppression keep going. We’ve got to have uncomfortable conversations and learn uncomfortable facts and fall in love with humanity and find new perspectives.” 

More uncomfortable conversations and more uncomfortable facts? After the four years we just had? What if even bringing up the idea of Ojibwe and Dakota cultural studies only opens up new fronts for the same old political fights? As I groped for words, Treuer sensed my hopelessness at the immensity of the tasks before us. 

“We don’t need to take this big mountain of problems and move it today,” he says. “We just have to plant the seeds, and that’s enough to transform the whole ecosystem.” He told me about his father’s weekend work. “I live on the same land my father bought. It was once virgin white pine forest, clear cut. He was one guy with a child labor force, planting seedlings. He changed the entire landscape and ecosystem here; now it’s hundreds of acres teeming with wildlife, coyotes and wolves and bears. [With] climate change and race relations, people think, ‘There’s not much I can do about that, I’ll try to be a decent person and hope that is enough.’ But I know we are building the smog of racism, sexism, every kind of ism, and there’s a transformative process that starts with seeds and gets us clean air—as long as you’re ready to move into action instead of hiding in the house watching TV.”

Helping Kids Discover An Ancient Language

When Anton Treuer isn’t busy being one of the world’s foremost authorities on Ojibwe language and culture and teaching at Bemidji State, he’s busy reading aloud to his nine kids. Unfortunately, Ojibwe-language picture books are few and far between, so he’s publishing a bunch, including three out this autumn from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Why leave academia for the world where foxes talk and readers sometimes smear jelly on the pages? “A language lives when it’s in the hearts and minds of young people,” explains Treuer. “Making children’s books in Ojibwe is all about restoring the language to its rightful place: in our kids.”

Nishiimeyinaanig (Our Little Siblings): A bit like Aesop’s fables, with animals for stars. Does the fox trick the rabbit? 

Akawe Niwii-tibaajim (First of All, I’m Telling a Story): A collection of true tales imparted by Ojibwe elders.

Anooj Inaajimod (They Tell All Kinds of Things): Modern storytellers share kid-directed stories about modern Minnesota life.

This article originally appeared in the November 2020 issue. 

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