The spark for the Dene Yati podcast came from Willis Janvier messing around on a Zoom call and a friend recording him.
“I was doing this voice, you know, like a radio voice type, and it was a funny clip that I posted to social media and people really got a kick out of it,” Janvier said.
Janvier is from Clearwater River Dene Nation, near La Loche, Sask., about 515 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon. The reaction to the clip made him want to start his own podcast and share conversations in the Dene language.
It was also a way for him to honour his father, who was once a broadcaster for Saskatchewan’s Indigenous radio network MBC and died in 2019.
Janvier started reaching out to other Dene speakers to have one-on-one conversations for the show. He brought in elders in to share stories and went out to the community to share what was going on.
He said there were many times he wanted to quit the podcast, but he pushed himself to keep going after thinking of his father and his grandmother, who was a language teacher.
“I’m doing their work. So I’ve wanted to quit many times but I know it’s needed,” said Janvier.
Dene podcaster Willis Janvier teaches a few simple words in his traditional language of Dene.
He said he gets an extra push via thankful messages from listeners who were in the foster care system and are now reconnecting with their culture.
“It’s all about sharing the language, hearing the language. A lot of people like myself, I’ve lived away from home for probably half my life now and in urban areas. A lot of people were displaced for residential schools or foster care, so they get to hear the language. That’s the only focus,” said Janvier.
“There’s no set topic each week and it’s OK. I used to go and look for the content, but now I let it come to me.”
The podcast now has listeners from as far as Russia.
Doing the show has also has helped Janvier himself reconnect with his Dene culture.
“I’ve received the drum. I’ve been taught ceremony. I’ve been taught stories that, you know, I never knew existed about being Dene.”
He grew up in the Catholic religion, as many other Dene have.
“I didn’t get to grow up with that drum, or the songs, and the people I’ve interviewed or met have also shared this with me,” said Janvier.
He wants his podcast to show young people that learning their language is still important.
“If a foreigner comes here and is immersed in the English language, and they lose their language, they can go home to their country and they’ll be surrounded by it again. Where are we going to go? Where are Dene Sųłiné people going to go if we lose our language?” said Janvier.
“We must value our language and just be surrounded by it.”
Allison Lemaigre, another Dene advocate who teaches the language to Grade 1 students, often wondered if she was doing enough with her language to make a difference.
That all changed recently, when she took centre stage in New York City at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.
Lemaigre met other Indigenous language advocates, some of whom didn’t even know their own traditional languages, there to gather information on reviving them.
“You can walk through my community and all of the little kids are speaking their name, and you hear their parents speaking,” said Lemaigre. “It just it made me hopeful and I realized just how much I have to be grateful here with our language.”
She said others wanted to know more about a Dene immersion program run by the Clearwater River Dene Nation. Lemaigre teaches Grade 1 at Clearwater’s community school.
Lemaigre was raised by her grandparents, along with their 10 other children, so she grew up always being immersed in the Dene language.
When it was spoken at home it was usually connected with traditional activities, she said.
It wasn’t until she was in her 20s and attending university that she learned how to read and write Dene. After university she headed back to her community to teach at Clearwater River Dene School, where the transitional-immersion program had been introduced in 2007.
Under the program, kindergarten to Grade 3 are taught with Dene as the main language, with English phased in as the students get older. Grades 4 to 12 are primarily taught in English, with Dene classes to compliment.
“A lot of it was in the beginning with trial and error. So we’ve kind of learned our own ways and best practices while we were teaching,” Lemaigre said.
“We’ve noticed that change in our students, they’re very confident, they’re very happy, they have a clear understanding of who they are and we really want to build a strong foundation in that part of their life before they go off into the world.”
Dene Sųłiné is the second most commonly spoken First Nations language in Saskatchewan
There are more than 6,300 Dene people in the province, with a estimated 80 per cert of them being able to speak the Dene language, according to the University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous Saskatchewan Encyclopedia. Dene communities are more northern, which has slowed the encroachment of English, according to the encyclopedia.
“I want to reach out to parents more, because I make those connections with my students a lot and I just really wanted to trickle out into the community,” said Lemaigre. “So just finding ways that we can let the community know that our language does have value and that it’s important that we learn it.”
Willis Janvier says his Dene language podcast honours his late father and grandmother.
