Yes, You CAN Learn Cree & Ojibwe (Even If You're White!)

so we got a lot of comments back from my
prior videos about learning Cree we got a lot of comments that didn't like her sitting on my lap what we got comments saying that she's too young to be my girlfriend yeah well we're gonna upgrade okay uh uh we got comments some of them reflecting really cynical Canadian attitudes I wouldn't even really say racist attitudes towards First Nations but just contemptuous and dismissive attitudes towards First Nations languages and I wanted to make a positive video type with the fact that you really can learn Korean a jib way now we're just item with this and you were mostly talking about your own decisions to learn German to not learn French your educational options in terms of a kind of economic instrumentality right and that's really the exact opposite of what I want to talk about at his video I mean it makes sense but she like many of the people who commented on my my prior video she was saying in effect that she would look at this as a high school student I'm guessing not as a primary school dear okay is a high school student looking this thinking how are you ever gonna earn money out of being able to speak French how are we gonna be able to earn money out of studying a modern language like Spanish or German etc right now think somebody must have taught you to think that way I mean okay so that's very close so your dad directly taught you to think of this in terms of economic outcomes and many of the people commenting on my video they're not crazy I just disagree with them it's just a different perspective they looked at this question of teaching Cree studying create each image of West at you or mohawk or Denny or in these limbs they looked at that as something incompatible with a fundamentally economic world view that all education has to serve this type of profit seeking motive and an outcome and it doesn't why do students study Shakespeare how meaningful is Shakespeare for the average twelve-year-old or the average fifteen-year-old or even the average 25 year old I think we can really question that you know really I've done a small number of people who find Shakespeare really meaningful most don't most don't for most it's just a drag from most is just waste time I think a lot of kids ask why am I being forced to memorize this speech at a Hamlet you know it's something that's gone by the wayside by the way what meringue poems memorizing literature we saw it to memorize a couple things when I was coming up no not until college okay okay you did a memorization interesting okay okay you know is this just a ritual based on a smug sense of cultural superiority that if you're a refined and educated person you want to know Shakespeare or what now in that context learning Cree learning a jib way learning Mohawk or dinner you can put in another native language here is that more or less meaningful then studying Shakespeare for for at least some people it's gonna be more meaningful right it's gonna be more meaningful obviously if you actually have creek heritage if you care about Cree heritage in history and customs okay but I actually it's a lot more meaningful for a lot of white people to think if you're a white person and you can sit down and really examine what's meaningful in your life you know in a static sense of looking at one snapshot it's probably not Shakespeare and then if you look moving forward let's just say you're a white person who lives in Saskatoon Saskatchewan and you drive around and interact with diverse people in the northern half of Saskatchewan as part of your job and part of your life if you now take ten hours a week to study study Shakespeare how is that gonna improve your life or make it more meaningful I've got to tell you if you took that time and put it into Cree it actually would make your life more meaningful it actually would be really rewarding that would be true with Cree in northern Saskatchewan it would be true of a jib way in western ontario okay and let me tell you life in saskatchewan is really bleak i think life in western ontario is also really bleak and I think it's intellectually rewarding and meaningful for you as an adult to sit down and take the time to put into learning Cree or learning a jib way I think it's rewarding and ease of some practical value you're gonna make new friends you're gonna see perspectives you know a living language it's not like studying Greek it's not like studying Latin it's really not they're all positive things you know if that are gonna come out of it especially if you live in a part of Canada where 10% of the population identifies as indigenous and at some connection without that heritage but even with that aside there's a question of what are you comparing it to I don't think very much of the math I was taught in my education had any economic value whatsoever and I remember other students loudly complaining why am i learning this crap what I learned about math didn't help me I cannot Blair learned about physics didn't help me economic if you take a narrow economic view of the utility of education and say everything this person learns everything we teach has to put dollars and cents into their pocket there's not that much to teach there's not that much to learn is there now on the other hand if you look at learning Korean learning a jib way as part of the meaning of life and having a meaningful life where you're saying well a lot of a lot of white people spend eight hours a week watching sports let you sleep eight hours watching junk on TV but you know football baseball ice hockey that's a lot of time that's a lot it's a significant percentage of your brain and your emotional mental energy you could be putting that time into learning ancient Greek you could be putting that time into learning Latin you could be I can speak from experience this you could put that time into learning Sanskrit or Pali these are some languages I really have experience with you know you could be putting that time into learning Chinese that that's true you know and I've got to tell you positively a language like creative way is much much easier to learn than Chinese it's much easier there's no comparison there's the level of difficulty and the point at which it would become rewarding to learn that language the point which you can put a sense together so I mean you've been studying Chinese for a couple of months and not not that hard not putting that much evident but still to string a sentence together in Chinese for someone who speaks English to the first night which are really really challenging right now you know I can also ask so that that's difficulty how difficult is this do in the absolute sense if you're you don't even need to be intelligent nobody needs to be intelligent to learn the language little children learn languages you can be completed he has to have a high level of ability on language it really doesn't take intelligence you just have to do the work if you do the work you get the results with language learning maybe maybe being brilliant helps but I don't know if it even helps 10% you know it's it's a small edge to be brilliant more talk about language learning it's something any idiot can do including you including you dear viewer so that's question difficulty the other question is how meaningful or how rewarding is it in your life right so this kind of through the day we type of this with French you can learn French is there any book you want to read in French that hasn't been translated in English is there anything you want to learn or access you know that you're not going to be able to access in English maybe the answer is yes for you maybe you're passionate about some kind of French philosophy or French literature that makes it a review fine your call your decision right for me when I look at a lot of these languages it's very hard for me to be motivated to learn French for that reason there's really nothing I want to read in French there's nobody right now in my life there's nobody I want to talk to in French I don't really want to live in France we may make that decision we may move to France it's quite possible in our future actually you know okay but it's actually really hard for me to make that commitment to learning French an ancient language like Sanskrit or Palli or Latin or Greek maybe there's something you want to read that's gonna make that meaningful and rewarding to you right maybe that's gonna light up your life you live in northern Saskatchewan or you live in Western Ontario and it's gonna let it's gonna make your nights a little bit less cold and bleak and awful if you can sit there and read Aristotle in the original ancient Greek or or whatever it is you like you can sit there and read Cicero and Latin etcetera right I know I know I know people watch sports instead of doing these things and people descend into alcoholism and gambling and skiing and other things that try to make their lives feel meaningful when they could be reading a lottery I gotta tell you I do think for the vast majority of people if you live in Western Ontario you know studying a jib way studying Soto or studying one of these line or possibly studying og Cree which is also a dialect of a Ghibli I think that really is more meaningful it really is more rewarding maybe in ways that would surprise you you know now of course it can open up doors for you economically absolutely it can but i from my perspective that is really beside the point you know if you're living in northern Saskatchewan learning Cree I think it'd be tremendously you know I even met I met one white police officer and he started learning Cree you know and a lot of his experience in terms of law enforcement and the prisons and everything else was was working with with Cree people and so on there are ways in which that's going to enrich his practice his life his career as a police officer it's gonna people are gonna share other perspectives with him it's gonna make him a bit of a cultural insider it's gonna give him a different perspective that he would never have as a white man only speak English or if he learns learnt Chinese or what have you yeah okay sorry I didn't know if you want to jump in but I mean we deal with this line of reasoning a lot in in veganism where people say well it's just a personal choice of course it's personal choice what language you learn is a personal choice you can talk to creep people who will explain to you that they made the decision not to learn Cree they made the decision this language doesn't matter them well it's creative layer or what have you there are people who will walk you through what their their reasons are of course the personal choice but part of the reason for human beings having a conversation is to talk about is this a good choice or is this a bad choice what's the best choice and for sure I mean I've I've known people who taught themselves Sanskrit I taught myself Palli I've met people who taught themselves Latin and Greek and Chinese all these languages and I myself have studied many languages including Chinese bla bla bla I have a lot of experience the language you can do it it is just your choice sure but it's probably a choice that not enough people have really thought about or really taken seriously when you watch football sitting on the couch every week you're making no personal progress you're gaining nothing you're left at the end of it entertained but empty okay if you took those few couple of hours a week to work on creo Jib way or any first nations language you would be making progress you'd be making progress day-by-day by week your life would become more meaningful it brings a lot of really positive stuff in your life it's very rewarding can I say it's easy I can tell you it's easier than learning Chinese I can tell you you know and we we just can't look at our own education whether on a systemic level or in terms of just our own our own private lives as individuals purely in terms of economic outcomes I if you feel Shakespeare is meaningless I feel you you know I completely completely in some way Shakespeare's meaningful and show you some ways it's meaningless that's up to you that's your personal choice also but we live in a society that thinks nothing of demanding that you take on this kind of literature with no possible economic outcome and really no possible way for you to progress personally through it for you to evolve or sign no pause anyway and I can tell you this study of languages it's really rewarding in all those ways and whether or not it's more work than studying William Shakespeare I think that's debatable okay