RRU doctoral student creates Dëne Sųłıné digital dictionary

A Royal Roads University doctoral student is helping create a digital dictionary to preserve her mother's ancestral language for generations to come.

Shawna Yamkovy completed her capstone project for the Master of Arts in Global Leadership program in June 2022, after visiting the community where she is a band member and her mother was raised, Łutsël K'é Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories, and meeting with Elders about the project.

Her trip into the community had been delayed due to COVID-19.

“What I had been missing the entire project was to have a sit-down with the community members,” says Yamkovy, now enrolled in RRU’s Doctor of Social Sciences program.

For her project, Yamkovy worked to develop strategies to retain and rejuvenate Dëne Sųłıné yati, much of it lost due to residential schools. Fewer than 10 per cent of the 800 people on the band list still speak Dëne Sųłıné.

A Łutsël K'é Dëne Sųłiné dictionary exists and is used in the school system. With community guidance, Yamkovy's goal was to digitize it, recording fluent speakers pronouncing words and using them in sentences or sharing stories. The idea is that students can learn to link them to concepts and assure that the dictionary was organic and could grow over the years.

Yamkovy’s late mother, Emerence (Emmy) attended St. Joseph Residential School at Fort Resolution from age five to 18. She spoke Dëne Sųłıné in residential school with her siblings whenever possible and during visits with her parents. She remained fluent until her passing in 2001.

The Łutsël K'é community has about 350 residents and is located in the eastern arm of Great Slave Lake, about 280 kilometres from Yellowknife, and is accessible only by air, boat or snowmobile. The community was under lockdown during much of the pandemic, due to health concerns and limited medical access.

Meanwhile, Yamkovy, who lives in Alberta, broadened her project scope, conducting digital surveys and interviews with band members living in her home province.

“I did a brief survey and was able to collect information on the importance of wanting to learn the language, access to learning the language, and those kinds of questions, and that was successful,” Yamkovy says.

She was finally able to visit Łutsël K'é Dene Nation this past June. She flew in on a small Twin Otter jet from Yellowknife, after a day spending time with family there.

“It was a 45-minute flight, and I was almost in tears,” says Yamkovy, who visited the community often as a child, but hadn't returned since before the pandemic.

“It was so emotional for me to finally to be able to get to the community, and an honour to be invited to meet with the Elders to discuss the project.

“We were still deciding on what needed to be done, what the community wanted to do,” she adds.

Much of the discussion centred on land-based learning, getting students out of the classroom and teaching them the culture and language — possibly for months at a time. Knowledge keepers could teach students survival skills including fishing, cutting wood or hunting game like caribou, muskox and moose.

“And these were the things they were saying their teachers had taught them, which were their parents,” Yamkovy says of the Elders. “It was something they spoke very passionately about. “

The meeting was a first step, Yamkovy says, in a longer process of building trust. And “… ensuring that the community is the beneficiary of this project,” says Yamkovy.