Thanks, Ben Godden, for bringing together a handful of your many talents to create this great little teaching video for kids. (The repetition and context make it really useful for us bigger kids, too.) I hope there are lots more like this to come!
In this case, Ben has imagined a teaching context, chosen resources, written text to fit, composed his melody, recorded that melody, created a video, subtitled the video in Cree and published it to YouTube. That’s eight individual functions that don’t even count the hours and hours of learning Cree, learning music, learning computer skills, or the time spent planning and practising to create a video without errors (or just imagining being a kid in the first place!)
While it would be amazing if everyone possessed this range of skills (and âhkamêyihtamowin), it’s also a reminder that we each have skills to share (even if some of us rely on more collaborators.) It’s also a reminder to appreciate the combined skill and effort it will take to create the vast library of resources we collectively need to support meaningful language revitalization – and to support young speakers of Cree, who represent the future of the language.
As for those kids: Their work should be play, and singing along is a just plain fun.