Dakota and Michif are being taught for the first time at the U of M this year.

The two new courses, topics in Indigenous languages: Dakota, and topics in Indigenous languages: Michif, join the university’s Cree and Ojibway courses, which have been taught at the U of M for decades.

The Dakota course is being taught by Kevin Tacan, who teaches language at Brandon University and in Brandon K to 12 schooling. Heather Souter is teaching the Michif course through a mix of distance learning and in-class teaching.

Each language course is made up of two three-credit hour sections, with the first half of topics in Indigenous languages: Michif having been taught this summer and again this fall alongside the Dakota language course. The second part of each course will be available for the winter 2020 term.

While associate professor and head of the department of native studies Cary Miller said she is hopeful about the courses’ future, she explained that they would, like any others, be at risk of elimination if enrolment is not strong.

“There certainly are senses of how many students need to be in a class in order to pay for the cost of instruction, and cost of instruction is not just the salary of the individual teaching, it’s the lights, it’s the building space, it’s all of those kinds of things,” she said.

“Generally, the expectation is that you need at least 10 students to enrol for it to be paying for itself, shall we say, to not take the dean’s office into deficit.”

According to Miller, the Ojibway and Cree courses usually have waitlists.

On the possibility of creating courses for more languages, Miller said it depended on demand. She mentioned Inuit, Dene and Oji-Cree as possible future offerings, and that she would like to increase the scope of the current languages taught.

“I’d like to see us get to a point where we can teach second-year Cree, and third-year,” she said.

“It’s going to mean making some connections with the community, having some conversations with the dean’s office about expected enrolments.”

Miller went on to explain the difficulties of keeping up enrolment in language courses.

“You start with 30 students in the first level class, but you generally lose statistically 50 per cent between the first year and the second year. So your second-year class, you have strong enrolment if you have 15,” she said.

“My hope is, through wait-listing, we’ll be able to show that there’s a need to offer two sections of the first-year level that will guarantee the numbers going up into second and third-year that we need to have to really make these programs strong and consistent.”

According to Miller, enrolment in Indigenous language courses is usually made up of students from communities where that language is spoken who are looking to learn the language of their communities.

“We also do get a smattering of linguistics students who are coming in from a variety of backgrounds, but the majority of students that we’re serving are students learning the language of their communities that are currently endangered,” she said.

“It’s not just something that is about heritage. It’s about relating to community.”

“As we learn our Indigenous languages, we are working to preserve our Indigenous intellectual traditions, our Indigenous knowledge. Because if we lose the language that articulates these abstract ideas, it’s gone.”