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The team at KTCEA focused the app on cultural traditions and activities by asking more than 150 Elders what they would like their children to know about their way of life, and what they would like the world to know about their nation.

“The communities we serve are still very entrenched in land-based learning, they still hunt, they still fish and trap as part of their way of life,” said Daphne Mai’Stoina, KTCEA superintendent. “So this was a natural progression, to have land-based learning embedded into the app.”

Anderson noted that there are a number of fluent speakers across the five nations the KTCEA serves — Peerless-Trout First Nation, Whitefish Lake First Nation #459, Loon River First Nation, Lubicon Lake Band, and Woodland Cree First Nation — but that it remains a challenge for students to retain Cree due to the pressures of social media platforms and the majority-English entertainment they consume.

A number of community members are also survivors of the Indian Residential School System, which stole the language from many of them by forcing their removal from their communities and forbidding Cree to be spoken while at these schools.

“Retention is where we want to ensure that there are the speakers under 25, because the language carries all the knowledge,” said Anderson.

She added that dialectical differences between Nations are captured in the app, with each nation taking on certain subjects including how to prepare fish, moose, and other land-based cultural activities.

The app is meant not only to support the 1,100 K-to-12 students the KTCEA teaches in a variety of classes, but also to share with the world the Cree language as it is spoken in the region.

“We didn’t have books in the past, so all the customs, the traditions, the culture, everything is embedded in the language,” said Mai’Stoina. “And for (students) to understand who they are, they need to know the language.”

The app is available on the Apple Store and on Google Play.

mwyton@postmedia.com

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