Allison Hanes: Nurturing the Mohawk language is a labour of love for Steve Bonspiel
His Sharing Our Stories project has spread its wings in the year since it became a non-profit and has big expansion plans. But raising the funds is a constant hustle.
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It started with a word of the week printed in Mohawk in 2020.
Then it grew to one page with two stories in the Eastern Door in 2022.
Now, Sharing Our Stories, a project to help revitalize the Kanien’kéha language and impart the wisdom of Mohawk elders, has its own website, a staff of nine, syndication in another newspaper, and soon will have 10 minutes of airtime on Kahnawake’s local radio station.
As it marks one year as a non-profit on May 3, founder Steve Bonspiel is not resting on his laurels. He has plans for audio and video content, TikTok shorts, books, a new office and expansion to other Mohawk communities.
But nurturing this labour of love, both creatively and financially, has been a constant hustle.
“I waited years to start because I was like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t have any money, where am I going to start?'” Bonspiel said in a recent interview. “I think the first six months was pretty scary, because it’s like, ‘Wow, we almost have nothing.’ The Eastern Door was paying for the payroll and getting reimbursed once in a while, here and there, with a little bit of money. … Nobody wants to do that unless they’re well versed or a little bit crazy. Luckily, I’m a little bit crazy.
“I said, ‘You know what? This is important. I believe in our language. I believe in our community. I believe in this project. So I will find a way.’”
Besides being executive director of the non-profit, Bonspiel is also editor and publisher of the Eastern Door, a community newspaper in Kahnawake. The catalyst for starting Sharing Our Stories was a grant to the paper from the Canadian Heritage Department through the local journalism initiative. It allowed him to hire the first co-ordinator to interview Mohawk elders about their traditional knowledge and life experiences. The resulting narratives were, and still are, published weekly in the Eastern Door in both English and Kanien’kéha.
But Bonspiel soon realized that to fully achieve his vision, he would need more resources and more money. Each elder who tells their story gets an honorarium (and sometimes coffee or lunch). Translation into Kanien’kéha is expensive, as proficient translators for an endangered language are few and far between. Expanding the reach into digital, audio and video takes technology, equipment, training — and more staff. Bonspiel soon decided that non-profit status would give Sharing Our Stories its own identity — and more opportunities to obtain funding through grants.
Chasing down the money to make things happen is a huge endeavour.
“I can’t go to any one of these grants and say, ‘I have a million-dollar budget for this year; can I have a million dollars to pay my guys, pay my elders?’ It doesn’t exist,” Bonspiel said. “You have to go to 25 different ones and see what we can put together.”
But the patchwork of grants alone doesn’t foot all the bills. So Sharing Our Stories had to get creative. It holds draws or auctions off Habs tickets to raise funds. Starting this fall, it will have a box at Place Bell in Laval, offering 12 tickets for $2,500 to concerts like PJ Harvey, Vampire Weekend or the National that individuals or groups can buy.
“We have different ways we’re doing it. We’re either selling it directly, the whole thing, (or) drawing it. We are also now partnering with other places. We have had talks with different companies about sponsorship, or they’re going to buy two or three suites to help us out,” Bonspiel explained.
They’re also looking to partner with other community organizations, non-profits or sports teams to sell tickets and split profits. Volunteers, from both inside and outside Kahnawake, are needed and welcome to contribute, whether they can sell tickets, donate money to buy recording equipment or obtain a discount on laptops. No offer of help or money is too small, since the fundraising work is time-consuming — and exhausting.
But to Bonspiel, it’s worth it when he gets feedback from the community on how Sharing Our Stories is enriching their lives.
There’s the mother who sits down and reads it with her son every week to puzzle out new words together, and a PhD student from the community at the University of Toronto who uses it as both inspiration and research into the perspective of elders.
“It’s become a resource,” Bonspiel said. “All of a sudden you’re able to see the words, understand, read, and then go to Sharing Our Stories and hear the pronunciation, break down the word and understand it from people who are explaining it to you in a different way that you’ve never had a chance to have access to. Because you don’t have access to the elders like that. … Some of the elders only speak — they don’t write it, they don’t read it.”
Amid all the concern in Quebec about the state of French and debate over measures to protect it, Kanien’kéha is far more fragile because of the oppression and stigma that long accompanied its use. Those fears linger, despite the embrace of efforts like Sharing Our Stories.
“The way we’ve been treated when we spoke our language in the past by outside entities, whether it’s the government or other people, has been: ‘Shut up. Don’t speak your language.’ And, of course, in residential schools you got beaten for it. Kids died because they spoke the language. So it’s still in a position right now where there’s reluctance. People are reluctant even to say ‘hi’ in Mohawk,” Bonspiel said. “So we’re still fighting that. Some people just won’t speak. They’ve been taught: ‘Don’t speak. You’re not going to have any opportunities if you speak the language.'”
Because of this bitter history, there is a huge generation gap in knowledge of Kanien’kéha. Some elders are speakers, but many of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are not, or have limited fluency. Hope of a revival now rests with younger generations.
“Now you see these kids coming up through the Mohawk immersion class locally who are speakers. Or at least conversational. You have families who are talking to their kids only in Mohawk,” Bonspiel said. “So the kids speak Mohawk first and foremost, but they’re going to school and learning English and some French. They’re positioned to be trilingual if their path is laid out in a certain way. You do see this revitalization and this hunger for it and this understanding that you can use it to further yourself, whereas in the past we were always taught: ‘Where are you going to go with it?’”
Sharing Our Stories is also resonating well beyond Kahnawake. It is now being published in the Gleaner, a publication in the Châteauguay Valley, in English and French.
Bonspiel also recently established the Pines Reporter, a non-profit news site for Kanesatake, on the north shore of the Ottawa River. Reviving Kanesatake Radio is already discussing the Mohawk word of the week on the air and looking at doing segments on the elders’ stories.
Bonspiel recently had conversations with Mohawk community members in Ontario, including Tyendinaga, near Belleville, and Six Nations, near Brantford, to see if they want to launch language revival projects. He wants to plant the seed, rather than oversee such initiatives, but he’s more than happy to offer up Sharing Our Stories as a template or provide advice on how to get going.
“Sometimes you just have to be put in a position where you have to do it. I’m now in that position. That’s it. I have to do this. There’s no failing. So I’m not going to make excuses. I’m not going to shy away from talking to somebody. I’ll put it out there to as many people as possible,” he said. “Because that’s what it’s got to be. It’s got to be somebody standing up for our community and the language.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this column said that the Gleaner was publishing Sharing our Stories in English, French and Mohawk. In fact, it only appears in English and French. The Gazette regrets the error.
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