Barbara Nolan is an Ojibwa elder and Nishnaabemwin-language immersion teacher who lives in Garden River First Nation but the community on the river has not always been her home.
"I was five, my sister was seven. they took us there, we were all happy, we had our little suitcases. We were all happy we were going to school," she said. "We rang a bell, and you know, I didn't know what these things were. We went in and there were these nice big, high ceilings, everything was just shiny. Our eyes must have been that big. We had never seen anything like it."Two nuns came to greet my mom and dad. After a while, we turned around and they were gone.
"There was only one very small corner on the playground where we could speak our language," she said. "It was always packed." "We were lucky we were only there for four years because we still had our language. We didn't lose connection with our family and our community." "I firmly believe that our dad thought 'I want my girls to be able to read, write and speak English.' He knew that we wouldn't be on the reserve all the time, that we'd have to go out into the non-Indigenous world to go and make a living."
"Language was building up in the early 80s," she said. "That's when they started this residential school awareness. I started my healing journey in 1985." By forbidding it, the nuns at the residential schools forbade references to the way of life and culture it reflected and tarnished the identity of its speakers, obscuring that identity with corporal punishment and subtractive bilingualism.
Wiisnii is the verb meaning to eat in Nishnaabemwin but her daughter added the 'ing' like you would in English. "When I received those awards I felt humbled. Like I wondered if I were worthy of them," she explained. "I feel like I could crawl under the table sometimes. Like, when I got the merit award from Sault Ste. Marie, I felt so humbled. For me to be at that level, it's so humbling.
Nolan was also part of the contingency of dignitaries that went to Edmonton to hear the Pope's apology this past summer and she went shortly after major surgery.