At the age of four, Emersyn Crate is already reclaiming a piece of her family’s identity that’s been missing for decades.
Her great-grandmother Janet says she’s the first in generations to learn how to speak Cree.
“I never had that opportunity to get to know my language,” Janet Crate told CBC News.
“I am always sorry that I didn’t learn and teach my children to speak Cree, to be proud of who they are.”
She’s happy that’s changing.
Like the majority of adults living in Fisher River Cree Nation, Crate, 73, isn’t fluent in the First Nation’s mother tongue. It was largely lost in residential schools that frightened survivors, including her parents, from passing the language down to their children.
With many of the elders fluent in Cree dying at the turn of the century, the Interlake community feared losing its language. It started on a path to revitalize the mother tongue where it began vanishing — at school.
Children at Fisher River’s elementary school are learning syllabics, with students in older grades practising how to say and write them. (Travis Golby/CBC)
“The Cree language is there. We just have to open it up and let it come alive,” said Norma Woodhouse, the vice-principal at Fisher River’s elementary school.
The language program has changed at the school over the last decade, building toward creating a dedicated Cree class students from nursery to Grade 6 take every other day of the week.
“We need to carry it on. It needs to be there again.”
Frank George began teaching the language at the elementary school in 2021, pushing a trolley with the material he needed to turn any room into a sharing circle where students could learn their first Cree words, starting with colours and numbers.
“We started there. They were so shy, they would whisper,” he said. “Now, five years later, they go so fast.… It’s come a long way.”
After learning other vocabulary, such as animals and shapes, most students in the elementary school can introduce themselves in Cree, and talk about who their family is and what community they belong to.
The language class now has a dedicated room beside the school entrance, covered in posters with images that are paired along the Cree word.
Among them is a chart with syllabics, the language’s writing system. During class, George grabs a stick, points at a symbol and makes the sound of how it should be pronounced.
The lesson turns into a song that students go over in class. Older students practise how to write the symbols, too, as they learn Cree’s foundation.
“They just take it in,” George said.
Frank George has been teaching Cree at the school over the past five years. He says it is important that the next generation learns how to speak the language to connect with their identity. (Travis Golby/CBC)
“Language is part of who they are,” he said. “It is very critical that students know that.”
Grade 5 student Lathen Sinclair, 11, has been learning Cree since enrolling at the elementary school years ago.
“It feels nice,” he told CBC. “It’s my language, and it’s also my culture.”
His grandparents know how to speak the language, and he hopes they can have conversations in Cree together someday.
Nora Murdock, the First Nation’s director of education, said the language started getting lost in Fisher River after children were forced to attend residential and day schools.
Survivors who were once punished for speaking Cree at these institutions, and when they grew old enough to have families, many chose not to teach the language to their children out of fear, she said.
Crate’s parents learned Cree at home but chose not to teach her the language after they went to residential schools.
The 73-year-old didn’t find anywhere else to learn the language and couldn’t teach it to her daughter.
“Those Indian agents really did a number on our people. They had a lot of influence.… They discouraged us from practising our culture,” Crate said.
Students from nursery to Grade 6 study Cree at the school. Nora Murdock, the First Nation’s director of education, says every effort to reclaim Cree brings ‘a sense of pride.’ (Travis Golby/CBC)
Increasing the proportion of fluent Cree speakers to around the level it was at before the residential school system will take years, Murdock said.
Fisher River has been working on curricula for Cree language education to divide topics among grades, increase the level of skills as students grow older and maintain consistency of what should be taught.
Despite the resources available, Murdock said language education needs to be included outside the dedicated Cree class to create fluent speakers and should be taught across the school system.
“We had to do something about it,” she said. “Without our language, it’s hard to connect with our identity and our culture.”
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Fisher River’s band council passed a resolution in 2024 that established the revitalization of Cree as foundational to the school system, making it mandatory for all education staff members to speak the language and include it in their regular instruction.
Teachers have been learning the language since then, and Fisher River is in the process of hiring a teacher to create a dedicated Cree class for grades 7 to 12.
Murdock said every effort to reclaim Cree gives the First Nation “a sense of pride,” as some children are already speaking the language at home, including Crate’s great-granddaughter.
“I am happy because she could teach her children [Cree] as well,” Crate said.
She believes her own parents would be excited to see their mother tongue spoken in their family again after three generations were raised without it.
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For Crate, it is about not having another family member living with a guilt she has carried.
“I am still a Cree woman. But I find, if I knew my language, I’d be true, true Cree,” she said.
