Boarding schools for Indigenous children were designed to assimilate them into a white man’s culture. What resulted was the total erasure from their collective memories and knowledge of their native languages and culture, says Michale Medawis, Language Coordinator and Cultural specialist with the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi.
 
Since 2016, he has held various positions with the Tribe, but it was in 2022 when he was hired for the job he’s now doing that he found his true calling — to ensure that future generations will learn how to speak the language of their ancestors and understand their culture.
 
“Right away I was thrown into working on an Emergency Language grant the tribe was awarded,” Medawis says.
 
The funding covered a three-year Master Apprenticeship project that immersed him in classes so that he could learn the language and teach others through a partnership with the Pokagon Band Advanced Language Speakers. Based in the NHBP’s Grand Rapids offices, he traveled once a week to Dowagiac to take those classes and completed his apprenticeship in 2024.
 
The next two years of the project involve the implementation of initiatives that will broaden his reach to Tribal members who want to learn to speak in the language of those who came before them.
 
After the apprenticeship, he took a few months to plan the next steps as far as what his position would look like and what his duties would be.
 
Mike Medawis conducts a workshop in Language Preservation at Grand Valley State University.“I teach a series of six-week classes for beginning learners and on Tuesdays, I host another class during the lunch hour which is geared towards employees and members of other tribes. We do have a Thursday class that’s been meeting every week here in Grand Rapids,” Medawis says. “We’re adding more intermediate and advanced classes.”

Some of the learning tools include Potawatomi language Bingo which happens on a semi-regular basis from April through October. One version is for Tribal elders and another is open to all ages.
 
An average of 20 Tribal members from different bands attend these virtual classes, including an elder from California.

In addition to the Tuesday and Thursday classes, a class on Monday evenings is offered for beginners. Medawis says the Thursday class, which had been for Beginners, is now for Intermediate and Advanced learners. Starting in April, all of the classes will be offered through a hybrid format.
 
In addition, Medawis provides translation assistance for the NHBP Tribe and its members and hosts workshops each week, one in Grand Rapids and one at the Pine Creek Indian Reservation in Athens Township. These workshops are available to any member of a federally recognized Tribe through a virtual format. Some of the learning tools include Potawatomi language Bingo which happens on a semi-regular basis from April through October. One version is for Tribal elders and another is open to all ages.

Some of the learning tools include Potawatomi language Bingo which happens on a semi-regular basis from April through October. One version is for Tribal elders and another is open to all ages.
 
“Twice a year we have a gathering of Potawatomi bands who come from Canada, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. They’re interested in language and they’re learners themselves or they might be on different language teams and want to see how we do things. This gives us a chance to immerse ourselves, network, and build stronger relationships with each other,” he says. “We bring in a couple of advanced speakers to do lessons throughout the day. We’re trying to keep everything going.”
 
The very survival of American Indian and Alaska Native languages is essential to the success of tribal communities and Native ways of life, according to a podcast on the National Congress of American Indians website
 
A group from a Language Workshops hosted by the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi.“Without urgent and sustained intervention, far too many Native languages risk extinction within the coming decades,” according to a description of the segment.
 
“Historically, indigenous communities across the globe have passed down their languages from generation to generation. However, colonization and cultural assimilation have jeopardized these languages, pushing them to the brink of extinction. When a language fades, identity is lost. 

"Preserving languages is critical if we want to promote cultural diversity and richness. Many Native communities rely on oral transmission, rather than written, to pass on knowledge, customs, and traditions. As language becomes jeopardized, so does the cultural transmission that goes with it,” according to an NCAI blog post.
 
“They are in the extinct stage,” Medawis says of Indigenous languages. “There are not many fluent speakers who survive.  Our elder fluent speakers are slowly leaving us and there aren’t many left today. We are trying to bond together with each band. That’s why we’re doing these immersion gatherings twice a year to learn from each other. There’s a good 40 of us who are learners, teachers, students, and instructors.”
 
Unlike the Pokagon Band and another in Kansas that have eight and 10 people respectively focused specifically on teaching the language of their Tribes, Medawis is the language point person for the NHBP. The Bands with more language staff are going into Head Start classrooms to teach the youngest learners. This is something Medawis would like to focus on in Head Start classrooms in Grand Rapids and Pine Creek.
 
In the meantime, he encourages Tribal members to take handouts and flyers he has available for them that contain informational tips that they could use at home with their children, among these ideas is to put up signs around the house identifying household objects in their native language.
 
“It’s a challenging language,” Medawis says.
 
Native language was foreign to him.
 
Medawis was born and raised in the Grand Rapids suburb of Wyoming.
 
As a young boy, he accompanied his mother and aunt to Tribal membership meetings at Pine Creek. It was at the reservation where he learned about his native culture but not the language.
 
“I was always involved in the Pow Wow’s. I was always raised around that. I would sing and drum and stuff,” Medawis says. “We have an Intertribal Council in Grand Rapids and they kept things going in the urban area with things like drum practice and language activities.”
 
Unlike generations before him who were subjected to prejudice and endured the racist remarks of their classmates, he says his peers respected him for always being his authentic self.
 
From l to r: Language Instructor Kyle Malott, Language Apprentice Dejonay Morseau, Language Instructor Carla Collins, and Mike Medawis“I played sports and had a lot of friends and kind of enjoyed the diversity,” he says.
 
After his high school graduation, he lived for a few years on a Tribal reservation in Manistee. He moved back to Grand Rapids in 2016 and took a job as a Youth Specialist with the NHBP because “the big thing for me is diversity and up north there wasn’t that much diversity.”
 
Despite the move south, he travels north to Suttons Bay every weekend where two of his eight children live. The job, he says, has not come without its share of sacrifices.
 
“I don’t have a place in Grand Rapids anymore. Since 2023, I go back home on weekends and come here for work,” he says.
 
That workload has been added to with his acceptance of a board member position with the Indigenous Education Initiative which is working on changes to the state’s school curriculum so that a more accurate representation of Indigenous Tribes and their members is being taught to students.
 
In 2021, the absence of a curriculum focused on Native American culture and the lack of an accurate accounting of their history changed with the use of an exhaustive, thorough, first-of-its-kind resource guide developed for educators in the state of Michigan by Indigenous educators. Their efforts were guided by the all-Indigenous-women-led Confederation of Michigan Tribal Education Departments (CMTED), which wanted to help Michigan educators better understand the rich history and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Michigan.
 
Medawis says he wants to be deeply entrenched in efforts to ensure that native languages and the culture are taught and embraced from the youngest to the oldest in settings that make sense, from schools to reservations and everything in between.
 
“I enjoy it and I love it. It’s something I can’t walk away from,” he says.