Valerie G. Barnes Connell Jordan
Northern Advocate
Author, educator and creator Solomon Ratt was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada on Governor General Mary Simon’s June 21 list.
“It’s great,” Ratt said of the appointment in an interview with the Northern Advocate. “(It’s) an honour. It’s an acknowledgement of the work I’ve done in Language development and language preservation for my Cree language.”
Rate will be installed in ceremony at Government House in Ottawa later this year, he said. The date hasn’t been selected, but Ratt expects it to happen sometime in the winter.
Ratt received a call from the Governor General’s office “a couple of months ago” to ask if he would accept the appointment. The easy part was saying yes. The hard part was keeping it to himself, so he said it was “good” when the announcement came out.
“They told me I can’t tell anybody except my family,” Ratt said. “It was really hard for me to keep a secret from everybody.”
Ratt began his career in education in 1984.
“My Cree teacher phoned me up and asked me if I could take over a class for an instructor who was sick … and it ended up into a full time job eventually,” he remembered.
Between 1984 and 1986 he did sessional work with First Nations University (FNU), which was called the Saskatchewan Federated College, at the time.
He worked with FNU until his retirement close to two years ago, although he went back last winter because FNU didn’t have an instructor to teach a class.
His main focus now, Ratt said, is “to just relax and do some writing.”
Ratt has written four books with the University of Regina Press, three that are translations of other books and “ a whole bunch of other publications for Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre (SICC) in Saskatoon.
Among the books he’s written are “actually textbooks for Cree language,” he said. They are: mâci-nêhiyawêwin – Beginning Cree and âhkâmi-nêhiyawêtân – Let’s Keep Speaking Cree.
Ratt’s first book for the University of Regina Press, Woodland Cree Stories, was in the Cree th dialect but, most has been in the y dialect.
“The y dialect and the th can understand each other well,” he said.
“I’m a TH Dialect speaker and I had to learn the Y Dialect at university. At first I said what a lot of people say. That’s not my dialect, I don’t have to learn that, but, I said, hold on, Put my pride in my back pocket and see what they have to teach me. And so I learned the Y Dialect. I learned that the grammar in the Y Dialect is the same as the grammar in the TH Dialect. We just have different ways of saying different things.”
Ratt was born in Stanley Mission, where he lived until he was sent to Residential School in Prince Albert at age six. Ratt would go home every summer to Stanley Mission.
“I grew up in Residential School in Prince Albert and I graduated from Riverside Collegiate in Prince Albert,” he said.
“It was a very lonely time of being away from my parents and it’s been chronicled in my latest book The Way I Remember.”
When Ratt went to Residential School, he was a Cree Speaker.
“I did not speak English at all, so I had to learn English at the Residential School. We weren’t allowed to speak our languages either. We don’t speak Cree in the school in front of the teachers or supervisors, caretakers. But, when we played, we spoke Cree to each other as long as our caretakers were not around to punish us for speaking the language, so here we were, Cree speakers trying to learn English, which is different from people learning to speak Cree today. The big difference is, when I was learning English, I heard English on TV, I heard English on the radio, and I heard English everywhere around me, my teachers and people who took care of us and other people in the community. They were all speaking English. I was bombarded with English when I was learning it, which is totally different from people trying to learn Cree today.”
Going into communities today, “you hardly hear anybody speaking Cree. You turn on TV, you don’t hear Cree, you turn on the radio, you don’t hear Cree. So, that makes it difficult for people to learn Cree, because they’re not hearing it anywhere in their lives. They have to make an extra effort on their own.”
But, Ratt said, there’s a lot of resources, bot online and in print out there for people to learn Cree.
One he spoke of was, Cree Literacy Network, which has text and audio and is available online.
Ratt’s latest book, kâ-pi-isi-kiskisiyän – The way I Remember, is a memoir and the latest of several books Ratt’s written over the years, came out in 2023.
“It’s an award-winning book, I have two Saskatchewan Book awards for it. That was just last month I got them. So that was great.”
