Issue 1 2026 – Chiefs of Ontario Advocate magazine l 21 But when that person never arrived, “I started to realize, ‘Well, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, with what we have,’” she shares. The community drew on Elders, fluent speakers and Dr. Kevin Brousseau, a Cree physician, linguist and lexicographer from Waswanipi in Quebec. “We started working on the dictionary project in 2012,” Govender says. The first edition contained approximately 6,000 words; the latest contains approximately 34,000. But even that cannot capture Moose Cree’s complexity. “You can express a whole, complete sentence in one word in our language,” Govender says. “It’s a very descriptive language.” Moose Cree is polysynthetic, allowing speakers to combine morphemes into highly descriptive words. While a similar thought can be communicated another way, “you can still describe it and communicate the meaning, but it’s not the same,” Govender says. For fluent speakers, the language comes naturally. With fewer first- language speakers, however, Moose Cree must now be taught more deliberately. “The fluent speaker is just going to speak, and they don’t think about grammar. They just use the right tense; they use the right everything. They don’t think about it,” Govender says. “Now, because we have so few speakers, we’re going to have to teach learners the way you teach a second language, including the grammar.” The online version of the dictionary includes audio and automatic verb conjugation. The team also launched a language-learning platform and hopes to create 240 modules. “If we have our language stored digitally or on paper, those will be valuable learning tools that can help future learners,” Govender notes. Still, technology cannot revitalize a language alone. “It takes a combination of all the language-learning tools, along with actual face-to-face practice with people.” Govender wants stronger immersion and more than the half-hour lessons some children receive. “Half an hour of instruction is not enough,” she says. “The kids are not really learning Cree. […] I’ve been told that you can study Cree all the way through university, but with the way it’s being taught, you still won’t be able to speak it, even after you graduate. “Our language should be the language we use every day, including in the way we conduct business. That would be ideal.” That ideal requires sustained, community-directed funding. “I think ongoing support, rather than only short- term project funding, would be really helpful,” Govender says, emphasizing that communities must set the direction. “Let communities decide how they want to do the work, rather than making them fit within government templates. It should really go into the communities.” Govender may be preparing to step away from the daily administration of the language program, but not from the work itself. She sees the future of revitalization in young people like her grandson, who labelled household objects with Post- it notes, visited fluent speakers in the evenings to practice conversation and eventually completed a master’s thesis entirely in Ojibwe. “Can you imagine?” she says. “So, it’s possible! When I see young people like that, I have hope that we can bring our language back.” When asked about favourite expressions, she offers tâni piko, an idiom meaning “I don’t know.” “In my case, it would be like, ‘I don’t know. Only the shadow knows,’” she explains. Then there is wenipan, which the dictionary defines as referring to someone or something expected but absent or late. “They’re expecting somebody, and that person never showed up, and they just say, ‘wenipan.’ It’s like saying, ‘They’re not even there. Do they even exist?’” That playful precision reminds Govender of her mother. “My mom was really good at that. She could describe something in a way that allowed you to picture it, because she was using those morphemes to make one word. Amazing stuff.” For Govender, that reminder echoes the hope behind the work: “Actually, when we get that back, that would be my thing: that people can get back to speaking that way again,” she concludes. 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