Everyday stories in a forest: Multimodal meaning-making with Ojibwe Elders, young people, language, and place

Abstract

Expanding efforts in Indigenous language revitalization and reclamation (e.g., Henne-Ochoa et al., 2020; Leonard, 2008, 2019; McIvor, 2020) highlight the ecology of relations that language is embedded in across communities and land. A critically important aspect of understanding these relations is a language’s “livingness” in place; that is, the context of where the language emerged and where the language is intertwined and has lived within lands and stories for generations. Taking up this intersection of language, land, and story, our paper examines the multimodal language of storying the land in Ojibwe in episodes from video-recorded intergenerational (Elders and youth) walks in the woods that were a part of an Indigenous languages documentation project. We focused on interactional episodes involving storywork (Archibald, 2008) and conducted interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Indigenous scholarship (e.g., Noori, 2013; Simpson, 2014) articulates the importance of stories as Indigenous theory, and this paper builds on this work, illustrating how everyday storying and walking on lands (Marin & Bang, 2018) are rich contexts for language learning and reclamation.