How do you do a kickflip in Anishinaabemowin? A new magazine showcases how Anishinaabe board sports enthusiasts are expanding the lexicon.
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Bimose Nick Reo has been riding land, sea and street since he was young.
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The Simon Fraser University associate professor of Indigenous studies says skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding became an even bigger part of his life after having kids of his own.
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But loving the sports and being able to talk about them have been two very different projects.
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“I kind of rediscovered skateboarding a decade ago, to the point that I now actively learn tricks and skate all the time,” he said. “I noticed that we have these different domains where it becomes harder not to sprinkle in English words into our language to discuss them.
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“If we want to try to build resilience and recovery in our language, we need to keep building new vocabulary.”
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To help further the lexicon, Reo, an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe), launched Asab Magazine. The first new annual publication introduces entirely new vocabulary about skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing in the Anishinaabemowin language.
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Reo focused some of his research as a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Coastal Relationalities and Regeneration on working with Anishinaabemowin-fluent athletes to create new words for common board sports terms: Everything from kickflip to goofy foot.
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The rich vocabulary and slang around these sports generated 300 new words.
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“We have very large vocabularies for traditional activities in everything from hunting and harvesting to environment and ceremony,” said Reo. “But we didn’t have a word for the types of tricks riders were doing like kickflips. There was a clear need to be able to talk about these activities in the language too, rather than turning to English to fill gaps.”
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Reo convened a small group of Anishinaabe snowboarders, surfers and skateboarders who were also experienced language learners with Maajigoneyaash Gordan Jourdain. Jourdain grew up speaking Ojibwe as his first and primary language.
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“This isn’t to say that second language learners can’t try to come up with new vocabulary, but for something like this, I would only trust a first speaker,” he said. “Because this would make it far more likely to pass muster across their peer communities and have a wider overall understanding. Anishinaabemowin is built on a lot of specific connection sounds and nuances that depend on how different beginning, middle and end parts of a word are arranged.”
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Anishinaabemowin is the Indigenous language of the Anishinaabeg people. It includes the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi nations and belongs to the Algonquian language family spoken across parts of North America. Reo wants Asab to reach as many speakers in those nations as possible.
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The group gathered at a retreat at a cultural retreat hosted by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Cloquet, Minnesota, for an intensive two-day session to put the first issue of Asab together.
