OIATC program · Flagship
Anishinaabemowin
One fluent speaker's recorded teachings, becoming a living course on technology the community controls.
Steven Bennett shares his teachings of Anishinaabemowin publicly. Lesson 1 is built from them, with his agreement: everyday kitchen words, each with the Anishinaabemowin as he writes it and the English beside it. The program records one fluent speaker's teachings, builds low-pressure places to hear the language, and builds learning tools the community controls. The 2021 Census put the average age of the Ojibway mother-tongue population at 48, so the next twenty years decide whether transmission restarts or ends.
A taste of Lesson 1: the kitchen
Spelling is shown exactly as Steven writes it. The full lesson, with audio and a practice mode that hides the English, runs on Minoo.
The work, by stage
- Live The curated corpus · 27 items from one fluent speaker's teachings, consent-tracked
- Prototype Lesson 1 · kitchen vocabulary, 16 items; the full version, with audio, runs on Minoo
- Live The language games · Shkoda, Crossword, Matcher, Agim, and Journey, live on Minoo
- Building The talking doll · a fluent Elder's voice in a child's hands, offline; build started, posted as it goes
Building the doll
A soft doll with a fluent Elder's voice inside: squeeze a hand for Anishinaabemowin, squeeze again for English. No screen, no app, no internet. The build has started, and the doll page is the log, updated as it goes.
See the doll and the build →How it is made
The fluent speaker records. The corpus is curated by hand. It is built into lessons. And it runs on infrastructure the community controls, not a platform that can be switched off from outside. That is OIATC's position on AI sovereignty, applied to a language: the data and the ground a community owns are the parts that last.
The full lesson, with audio and practice mode, lives on Minoo, the community platform where you actually learn the language. Minoo also carries its Anishinaabemowin dictionary and the language games.
Learn it on Minoo →The fundable next step
Funding extends the corpus beyond one speaker, ships the next lessons end to end, and pilots the doll batch and a season of community story nights.
Pilots the first doll batch and a season of story nights.
Funds a year of the program lead and Elder honoraria.
More from this program