Michelle Goose: Healing intergenerational trauma through language

A little over a decade later, the Ojibwe Immersion Academy founder has made great strides in revitalizing the language, and with the receipt of the prestigious Bush Foundation Fellowship, she stands poised to amplify her success.

The fellowship, announced June 11, is among 24 that are awarded in the annual competition. Recipients receive grants of up to $150,000 each to fund leadership plans during the fellowship that lasts from 12-24 months. According to the Bush Foundation, each fellow requests the amount they need.

A big part of the work Goose does involves healing trauma around language and culture. “Much of the language loss is due to intergenerational trauma from boarding schools and the grandparent generation choosing not to speak Ojibwe with their children,” said Goose. “Many other traditional parenting practices, such as giving children Ojibwe names within the first year of life, also skipped my generation.”

The loss of culture has affected Indigenous communities across the United States for generations. As of 2009, there were only 8,355 Ojibwe speakers left in the United States.

“Now adults who are my age with children are working to give our children those experiences that were missing from our childhoods,” said Goose. “It’s very hard work and takes dealing with all the feelings of not having those things as children to be able to give them to our own children.”

As a child, Goose picked up Ojibwe words and sentences from listening to her family’s conversations. In high school and into college, she took learning Ojibwe seriously because she wanted to connect more deeply with her culture.

“The language holds a lot of cultural knowledge,” said Goose. “Although I was raised with Ojibwe culture, the language was something I was missing for me growing up. So I didn’t really feel like I truly understood myself as an Ojibwe person until I started learning the language. And that just made my sense of identity and sense of self-confidence a lot stronger. There’s so much more that you can understand about the local environment and about the culture through the language, so it gives you a deeper understanding of the Ojibwe world that we live in.”

While working in language revitalization, Goose became more aware of how language loss affects Indigenous communities’ culture. For her tribe, traditional funeral and drum ceremonies are meant to be conducted in Ojibwe. “If we don’t have people that can speak Ojibwe, then we can’t conduct those ceremonies as they were meant to be conducted,” said Goose. “It’s really important to preserve it for passing on traditions the way that they were intended to be practiced.”

Goose plans to use her 24-month Bush Fellowship grant to go on a sabbatical, take a break from teaching, and focus on developing several new projects. Among them, Goose will develop new upper-level language courses, draft an Ojibwe language textbook, and complete coursework for a graduate certificate in advanced practices in secondary language teaching.

As part of her Bush fellowship plan, she will also travel to visit other Indigenous education programs, attend conferences and workshops, continue to work on her language proficiency, and network with other Ojibwe language educators.

For six years Goose has been an Ojibwe language instructor at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. Her language revitalization work at the college has included formulating a curriculum that weaves together the language with the cultural practices of the Anishinaabe people.

In addition to teaching students how to introduce themselves in Ojibwe, Goose incorporates the seasons into her lessons. During the fall, she teaches a wild rice harvest unit. When it’s closer to spring, she has a unit on traditional tobacco. Goose wants to make her curriculum culturally rich, so it goes beyond the surface level of learning words, diving into cultural practices and perspectives as well.

“I’m really into land-based education and the connection that the language has to the land, so I try to organize the curriculum by the seasons so that it’s relevant for what’s happening at that time of the year,” Goose said.

She is currently in the process of approving an Ojibwe major so that students can get their Associate of Arts degree in the language. Prior to becoming a college instructor, Goose was a preschool immersion and high school teacher.

The Ojibwe Immersion Academy, which she founded with two friends soon after graduating as an extension program at Fond du Lac Tribal College, is a language workshop for adults in the community. It began as a three-week summer camp on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and eventually expanded to include monthly weekend workshops. Though she no longer works with the academy, Goose said she is glad it’s still in operation.

“It was started with adults in mind and trying to connect them with first language speakers and provide them with an immersion environment where they can increase their language proficiency,” she said. “There aren’t really many immersion opportunities for the Ojibwe language since it’s an endangered language.”

Her colleague Cathy Podeszwa, a biology and sustainability instructor, has been following her work for years. The ecologist teaches environmental science and sustainability courses at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. Goose was her office mate and also her instructor when Podeszwa took her Ojibwe classes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Michelle is so generous and open in her classes,” said Podeszwa. “She has such a gentle and warm spirit about her, and she has so many great teaching techniques. I learned a lot from her as a teacher in terms of mixing things up. She’s a good teacher. I felt really at home in her classes. It felt like she was building community with us.”

Back in 2020, Podeszwa enrolled in one of Goose’s Ojibwe language classes ​​because she wanted to get a better understanding of Anishinaabe culture. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic requiring all instruction to go online, Podeszwa said Goose made the transition easy and fun. Podeszwa said she continued to take Goose’s Ojibwe courses for two years because of how enjoyable they were.

“She’ll correct you gently so you can understand it, and then you can move along,” said Podeszwa. “It was interesting too because in the classes we really bonded, even though we never met each other in person – because she was really good at throwing us into small breakout groups where we would play a game like Battleship, using Ojibwe words.”

Leanna Goose has always admired her older sister. Though there was only a three-year age difference between the two, Goose recalls her elder sister taking care of her and their other siblings. Goose recalls her sister always looking after others and setting the path for the younger members of their community.

Goose’s efforts with revitalizing Ojibwe has been inspiring to her younger sibling. “I’m really proud of the work that she’s doing to revitalize our language,” she said. “She’s like my hero for the work that she’s doing.”

One of the projects that stood out to Leanna was interviews with elders from the community. “They spoke in Ojibwe and she helped translate those,” she said. “I was just looking through those stories yesterday, and I’m just so grateful that she got those elder stories down because some of those elders are not here now, but we still have their stories with us and that part of the culture remains.”

The instructor’s friends, family and colleagues were happy to hear that Goose had received the Bush Foundation fellowship. “She really has a vision of trying to get more people together to just speak Ojibwe,” said Podeszwa.

Her younger sister is looking forward to seeing everything Goose will accomplish during her time as a Bush Fellow. “Just being around her when she speaks the language, I learn from her,” said Goose. “I’m excited to see what she does in the future around the language and revitalizing it, because it is endangered, but Michelle is actively teaching young minds.”

While Goose is ready to begin her sabbatical, she knows these next two years will be busy. Despite the workload, she is passionate about continuing to fight for her Ojibwe.

“[I wish] it would just be normalized as a language that people speak every day,” said Goose. “I think we’re making good progress with language revitalization. It’s still challenging though because English is everywhere and there aren’t many spaces where you can go and hear people just speaking Ojibwe as a language of communication. So if everybody knew a little bit of Ojibwe, that would really go a long way.”