'Sharing Our Stories': Initiative by Kahnawake newspaper aims to preserve Mohawk language

Only a few thousand people still speak Kanyen'kéha, the Mohawk language.

In Kahnawake, across the river from Montreal, an initiative by The Eastern Door newspaper called "Sharing Our Stories" is encouraging community members to have their say, in their own language.

According to Simona Rosenfield, a Concordia researcher and writer for The Eastern Door, there are fewer than 3,500 Kanyen'kéha speakers left worldwide.

"There's a direct relationship between the impacts of residential and Indian Day School and the decline of the language," she said.

It's a reality Mohawk Elder Joe Jacobs knows firsthand.

"Just on my street alone, that's all we heard was the [Mohawk] language. And then The Indian Day Schools come in, you start school at seven, and slowly you start losing the language," he explained.

Now, The Eastern Door is working to "replant" the language, says editor Steve Bonspiel.

"That's the beautiful thing about Mohawk. There's so many ways to transform one word to mean so many different things," he told CTV News.

For decades, the newspaper has published a Mohawk words page to reacquaint readers. Recently, it started incorporating stories from citizens written in Kanyen'kéha.

"You have an English and Mohawk," Bonspiel said. "You have some photos, you have a spread where people can understand what they're reading. The elders can read it in their first language."

With so few fluent speakers left, translation is tricky, and Mohawk elders guide new scholars.

"They hold all the knowledge of the language. They can think back to say, 'actually, this was said this way because of this,' and give that context of how that work was constructed," he added.

Rosenfield said the paper hopes to expand the project with audiovisual elements in the future.

"I cannot express how hungry and thirsty people are for engaging with the language, for developing their knowledge."