Gitchitwaa Kateri parishioners reclaim Ojibwe language through hymn translation

Holding a wooden flute, Larry Martin stood during Mass July 10 and welcomed the congregation to join the responsorial psalm. He began: “Aw ge-chi-twaaa-wen-daa-go-zid, Gi-gi-zhe-ma-ni-doo-mi-nann.”

The language was Ojibwe, and the words translated to “Our God is the one who is glorious,” taken from Psalm 19.

Martin, a 79-year-old director emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, worked with another language expert to convert the English to Ojibwe, the traditional language of many of the American Indian Catholics who worship at Gichitwaa Kateri in south Minneapolis, Martin’s parish.

Most of them can’t speak their ancestors’ language, but it’s meaningful to pray in it, he said. “It helps them give voice to their Indian identity,” he said.

Gichitwaa Kateri is home of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Office of Indian Ministry. Since 2018, Martin and fellow parishioner Rick Gresczyk have translated into Ojibwe most of the responsorial psalms used in the Church’s three-year Sunday Mass cycle. That built on a project they began years earlier to translate popular hymns such as “Ode to Joy,” “Hail, Holy Queen” and “How Can I Keep from Singing?”

Their work caught the attention of Catholics planning Pope Francis’ visit to Canada, which began July 24 (see the special report, pages 9-11). At the request of organizers of the pope’s visit, Martin submitted a few hymns for consideration, including “Wezhitooyan Gakina Go” and “Hymn for Kateri Tekakwitha.”

The first, an Ojibwe creation song Martin and Gresczyk composed, was inspired by three sources: an Old English creation hymn, an Ojibwe creation story and a hymn attributed to Pope St. Gregory the Great. It was set to a traditional hymn melody called “Prospect,” and in 2019 it was sung by members of the choir of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., during the Knights of Columbus’ Supreme Convention, held that year in Minneapolis. Martin and his wife, Claire, worked on pronunciation with the singers, he said. The hymn was also recently featured at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis in connection with the art exhibit “Terra Nostra, Our Earth,” which was on display in May and June.

The second hymn was created by Father Jan Michael Joncas, a well-known liturgical composer and recently retired priest of the archdiocese. In 2012, he collaborated with the Gitchitwaa Kateri community to craft a hymn to celebrate the canonization of the parish’s namesake.

None of the hymns Martin submitted was ultimately chosen for the papal visit, confirmed Deacon Pedro Guevara-Mann, senior programs lead for the 2022 papal visit to Canada.

Martin thinks that might be partly due to regional difference: The Ojibwe dialect spoken in Canada differs from the dialect Martin and Gresczyk use, he said. He said it was an honor for the hymns to be considered.

In addition to their translation of popular Catholic hymns and psalms, they’ve set to music Ojibwe-language prayers of Bishop Frederic Baraga, the first bishop of Marquette, Michigan, whose 19^th-century missionary work focused on communities around Lake Superior, including Minnesota’s North Shore. Bishop Baraga created a prayer book and hymnal in Ojibwe, set to the melodies of French Folk tunes. The hymns were popular among Ojibwe Catholics, Martin said.

Martin, who holds a doctorate in English linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dedicated some of his academic work to preparing about 100 of those hymns for contemporary use.

Like elements of Pope Francis’ Canadian pilgrimage, Martin and Gresczyk’s translation initiative is tied to culture reclamation efforts underway in the U.S. and Canada, in response to the Indian boarding school era, where American Indian and Indigenous children were removed from their homes and sent to government-funded schools, some run by Catholic religious orders and dioceses, where they were often not allowed to speak their native languages or express their cultures.

“The Church is responsible for damage to language, so we thought we should do something about bringing it back,” said Martin, who is Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe.

For the translations, Martin credits Gresczyk’s deep knowledge of Ojibwe. Martin doesn’t consider himself fluent, but says he can tweak grammar and align Gresczyk’s translations with the chosen melodies. Gresczyk now lives in northern Minnesota, so the two mostly collaborate by phone. Martin, who received graduate-level seminary formation at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., but left before ordination, also writes a short lesson to explain the translation, including notes on culture and theology. Those notes are published in Gichitwaa Kateri’s Sunday worship guide along with the psalm’s translation.

Shawn Phillips, director of the archdiocese’s Office of Indian Ministry and pastoral minister at Gichitwaa Kateri, said the translations help parishioners pray and learn more about their culture and heritage. He hopes one day there will be a similar effort to translate prayers into Dakota, so both of the primary Native American cultures in Minnesota would be represented, he said.

The translation effort is important, Phillips said, because “God will speak to them in their own language.”

“That was the Pentecost message,” he said. “It wasn’t that the Gospel be in Greek or in Roman, but … all of these people could understand it. It’s that God cares about us and speaks to us in our own language and knows us intimately.”