This project is a collaboration between the Kingston Indigenous Languages Nest and Community Story Strategies artists, Emmanuelle Pantin and Jennifer LaFontaine.  The centerpiece of this project is a website with over thirty digital stories about culture and language made by adults, youth and children.  Indigenous knowledge connects digital stories are to the domain of Dbajimowin, or stories about personal understandings and experiences, and each story provides valuable teachings.  Each personal story shares insights into the barriers to language learning and cultural connection as well as the many ways we are resilient and relentless.  Decolonization requires that we regenerate Indigenous knowledge, ways of knowing and living day-to-day. We have used digital storytelling as a way to decolonize our personal narratives and engage in language revitalization. The project supported absolute beginners to fluent speakers to share in Anishnaabemowin, Mohawk, Cree, Mi’kmaq and more as a way to extend their language learning through storytelling.

Meeting each season at Elbow Lake Environmental Education Centre, language nest members joined Community Story Strategies to make a collection of language learning resources connected to the digital stories. We pulled out key themes from each story, and explored how the story could support further language and cultural learning. We created vocabulary lessons, creative activities and cultural teachings. We drew on our own knowledge, and modeled the kinds of learning that takes place in our language nest programs, our intermediate language circles and our own kitchen tables as we scour the internet looking for ways to keep learning language. We involved our children in the creation of the videos, engaging them in language learning as they jumped off docks, climbed trees and brushed teeth. After each content creation session with language nest members, Community Story Strategies created language and culture videos from the footage. We worked to create a website that is easy to navigate and highlights both the language activities and the digital stories.  In this process, we involved our fluent speakers, our intermediate speakers, and our beginning speakers. We encouraged everyone to be a leader. We may not all be perfect speakers, but we are sharing what we know and encouraging each other to speak up and be proud of our language learning efforts. We have sorted the stories in different ways: by digital story, by language and by cultural teachings.