KAWENNÍ:IO (Beautiful Words)
Lauren Williams ’01 is helping to revive and spread the endangered Mohawk language
By Mary K. Nolan
THANK YOU. HORSE. HELLO.
That was about the extent of Lauren Williams’ Mohawk vocabulary when she was growing up in suburban Toronto, the daughter of an Indigenous mother and non-Indigenous father.
Now, Lauren ’01 is a full-time teacher of the endangered Haudenosaunee language—Kanyen’kéha— imparting its beauty and complexity to about 50 students in Grades 4 to 8 at Prince of Wales school in Hamilton. Not all of them are taking the class because they share her First Nations heritage or
passion for the language. “Some of them are there just to get out of French,” she laughs.
Regardless, Lauren is keen to educate anybody who will listen—including her two energetic Samoyeds who are the rare, perhaps only, dogs who will sit when told to “sátyen” and fetch when they hear “skóha.”
Lauren, whose Mohawk name is Kahsenniyohstha, and her sister Karenna ’04 weren’t raised speaking Mohawk or hearing it in the home. Their mother didn’t know it, despite growing up on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve, and their maternal grandparents were “silent speakers” who had some grasp of the language but were never taught at home or in school.
Their great-grandparents, fluent in Mohawk and Cayuga, attended Brantford’s Mohawk Institute, part of the notorious governmentbased network of residential schools now under investigation for systemic abuse of Indigenous children. Punishment was doled out for not speaking English, among other transgressions, and students grew up with neither the ability nor the inclination to teach their languages to their own children. “That’s 100 years of languages lost,” Lauren says sadly.
The Williams sisters enrolled at HSC in 1994 after the family moved from Leaside in Toronto, where they had attended independent schools since kindergarten, to Middleport on the edge of Six Nations.
Lauren, who was in Grade 7, found the transition difficult. She was a shy, quiet, independent girl, but eventually “found more of my voice and my confidence.”
She distanced herself from anyone who gave her a hard time, achieved good
grades, played soccer, developed her abilities in art and discovered an affinity for language and etymology in English class.
Lauren says she responded well to the calibre of HSC teachers and their methodologies, singling out late art teacher Doug Moore.
“He had a really profound influence on me and was an example of how to not only create art, but how to live and act compassionately, learn life skills and life lessons, to think critically and kindly, and value the differences in people. He was fabulous, really a good man.”
After HSC, Lauren earned a degree in English and classical civilizations at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College and went on to do a master’s degree in ancient history and historiography at the University of Bristol in England.
Basically, historiography is the writing of history, but people like her own ancestors relied solely on oral traditions. How did they learn it or remember it? It was one thing for her to remember AC/DC lyrics verbatim, she jokes, quite another to hear the elders and knowledge keepers in her Six Nations community reciting intact stories that were multiple generations and hundreds of years old.
At 25, Lauren took a job as interim executive director of Woodland Cultural Centre, on the grounds of the old residential school, which is dedicated to preserving Haudenosaunee history, language, culture and art. When she was invited to speak at a Sweetgrass language conference later that year, she realized she would have to deliver her remarks in English.
“I felt awful,” she says. “I felt humiliation and shame.” She recalls thinking, “I know why I don’t know this, but I hate that I don’t know this,” and talking about those feelings in her address.
“Afterwards some beautiful older ladies—aunties and grandmas—came up to me and told me that [educator and elder Tehahenteh] Frank Miller was starting a class in Mohawk language at Six Nations Polytechnic and I should sign up. When I got home, he was sitting there in the kitchen with my dad, having tea!
“I think the universe was really kind of pushing me,” she says.
Miller promised that within months she’d be able to say a simple version of the sacred thanksgiving practice, which offers greetings, love, gratitude and respect to the grass below, the stars above and everything between. It’s an acknowledgment of all aspects of creation and the natural world, and can take a few minutes to recite or, for a proficient speaker, up to an hour.
There were about 20 adult language learners in the three-month course, all looking for healing from the historic loss of their native language and eager to understand and participate in common oral traditions of their culture. It began at a higher level than she expected.
With half as many characters as the English alphabet, a polysynthetic structure and long words made up of morphemes, Mohawk is not easy. But quitting is not in Lauren’s nature. “It was critical for me to be able to have that piece of my ancestors and my culture in order to understand my place in the world better,” she says. By the end of the course, as promised, she knew the thanksgiving, which she still offers up morning and evening, every day. She has now been studying Mohawk for more than 13 years.
After a break to see a bit of the world, Lauren returned to Six Nations and began working for Grand River Employment and Training, developing seniors’ programming and simultaneously learning from them, drawing on their wealth of knowledge and wisdom.
Then she was invited to develop an Indigenous students support program in Hamilton public elementary schools, based on the Native Youth Advancement With Education Hamilton (NYA:WEH) program already in place at the secondary level. It would involve cultural education, career planning, co-ordinating workshops and input from artists, elders and the communities, all supporting each child’s unique gifts and interests and examining “what it means to
“I think the universe was really kind of pushing me.”
be an urban Indigenous child.” NYA:WEH nourishes the relationship between mainstream education and the culture of First Nations, Inuit and Métis youth, and is designed to keep those students in school and thriving.
Within a few years, Lauren was in the classroom, teaching Mohawk to middle school kids by special permission from the Ministry of Education. She became fully accredited last year with a bachelor of education degree from York University’s Waaban Indigenous Teacher Education program.
Lauren aims to connect her students with the language not just via words but also through mathematics, history, poetry, weather, cooking, art and other everyday topics. She even has them beading, an ages-old Indigenous art she took up as a child and now enjoys in her quiet time, along with painting,
moccasin-making and sewing traditional ribbon skirts.
Lauren realizes that with so few speakers— an estimated 3,500 in the world, mostly in southern Ontario and parts of Québec and New York state—and even fewer who are truly fluent, Mohawk doesn’t have global practical applications.
“It’s not on the ketchup bottle,” she laughs. “But it helps me connect with the people I love the most.”