This fall, Wisconsin’s Bayfield School District is launching an Ojibwemowin immersion program for kindergarten students in collaboration with the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
The district of just over 400 students is one of the few in Wisconsin where the majority of kids—69.2 percent—
are Native American.
“I can’t [overstate] how significant this is—not only for our community in our area, but for our children and their future,” Paap, who is a Red Cliff Tribal member, told Wisconsin Public Radio. “Cultural identity has been something that the federal government has worked really hard to strip away from Indigenous people, and the fight continues to reclaim identity and lifeways.”
Binesiikwe Edye Washington, the Tribe’s Education Division administrator, said the district intends to expand immersion programming to K–5 students at the classroom level by adding a grade each year. “Students would be learning all content areas through Ojibwe language—anywhere from reading, math, singing, games, all of those things,” Washington said. As of 2010, census estimates show almost 8,400 people could speak the Ojibwe language across North America. Officials with Bayfield Schools and the Red Cliff Tribe have been working with the Minnesota-based Midwest Indigenous Immersion Network on efforts to
revitalize language.
Gimiwan Dustin Burnette, the group’s executive director, first began working with the Bad River Tribe as an instructor for its adult language-training program in 2020. In late 2021, the Red Cliff Tribe announced the creation of a three-year adult language-learning program with the goal of training teachers to be fluent in Ojibwemowin. For the past two years, Burnette has worked with a cohort of trainees from both Tribes.
