Wisconsin School Works To Save Ojibwe Languages Before Native-Speaker Elders Disappear

On the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, near Lake Superior in the northwestern corner of the state, is a K-8 school called Waadookodaading (“a place where people help each other”), where Ojibwe children are taught, in their ancestral language, a curriculum that combines federal and state educational requirements with traditional culture. For instance, the kids study biology using fish they’ve speared, and the wild rice harvest becomes a way to learn how to measure volumes. But