The sound of children singing O Canada in Cree greets the halls of Joe A. Ross School each morning — a melody once thought to be fading, now rising again.
At the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, located 520 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, a bold experiment in language revival is underway. Nearly 200 of the school’s 500 students are enrolled in Cree immersion classes, spanning nursery to Grade 6. The rest still touch the language daily with a half-hour Cree lesson.
For Principal Karon McGillivary, who grew up discouraged from speaking Cree, the program feels like a dream realized.
“That’s what our goal was — to hear our children speak the language again,” she says.
The program, launched two decades ago, is more than vocabulary drills. It includes land-based learning, an apprenticeship pipeline for future teachers, and lessons that link language to identity. McGillivary insists Cree is not just words, but culture, history, and belonging: “No matter what happened in the past … you’re here today, learning your way of life to move on to Mino Pimâtisiwin, the good life.”
Generations reconnecting
Statistics Canada counts just over 13,000 Cree speakers in Manitoba, making it the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the province. But numbers alone don’t capture what it means for eight-year-old Ronin Hall, a Grade 3 student who proudly uses Cree at home. His favourite lessons so far include colours, the seven teachings, and the alphabet. “I want to speak Cree every day — to my friends, my mom, my dad, my brothers,” he says.
For Grade 5 student Kiefer Pelly, the lessons are a bridge to his grandparents, both fluent speakers. “It’s important to learn Cree so we can pass it on generation to generation,” he adds.
A path of reconciliation
The timing is poignant. On the eve of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, students in orange shirts filled hallways decorated with Every Child Matters artwork — reminders of the painful history that stripped Indigenous children of their languages in residential schools.
Teacher Linda Constant, guiding Cree classes for 17 years, has seen the change firsthand. Some of her students grow up to use Cree in their workplaces and families. Even if fluency is a longer journey, she says, the values carried in Cree words prepare them for strength:
“We need to be out there and make people aware that we haven’t lost our language. We are going to rebuild it, and we are going to become strong again.”
For Opaskwayak, every word spoken in Cree by a child is not just language learned — it’s heritage reclaimed, resilience remembered, and reconciliation in action.
