For this ASU alum, preserving a language means preserving a culture
"Our language, essentially, is our culture," says Bagwajinini-Alex Kmett, who has dedicated much of his life to Ojibwe language revitalization. Photo by Caroline Yang
Tucked into the forests of northern Minnesota lies a landscape of rolling hills, wetlands and sprawling freshwater lakes spanning more than 1,200 square miles. The Red Lake Nation, a band of Ojibwe people, has called this place home for centuries.
Today, members of the tribe are working to ensure one of their greatest sources of knowledge, the Ojibwe language, continues into the future. Bagwajinini-Alex Kmett, an alum of Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation and citizen of the Red Lake Nation, has dedicated much of his life to that work.
"Our language, essentially, is our culture; our culture is embedded and encoded within it," Kmett said. "To seek out our language is to seek out who we really are."
For Kmett, education was a central part of that equation.
“During the pandemic, our community was having a lot of discussions around what we'd like to see education look like here,” he said. “We really wanted our school to be grounded in culture and language, and engage our life ways; to spend as much time outdoors as possible.”
This vision led to Endazhi-Nitaawiging Charter School, the Red Lake Nation’s first tribally operated charter school, where learning is based in the Ojibwe language and traditions. As a founding board member, Kmett helped design the school's educational framework around Indigenous knowledge and history.
Preserving a way of life
Like many Indigenous communities across the country, the Red Lake Nation experienced generations of language and cultural loss through the boarding school era. A Catholic mission school operated on the reservation beginning in the late 1800s, where students were forbidden from speaking Ojibwe or practicing their traditions. Over time, the language began to disappear.
Kmett, who has spent more than two decades learning Ojibwe, says the loss went far deeper than the words themselves.
Ojibwe is a remarkably complex language — even recognized by Guinness World Records as one of the most complex in the world. It is polysynthetic, meaning small units of meaning combine into words capable of expressing ideas that would require entire sentences in English. Even a single syllable can communicate a dense scientific concept.
Because of that, the language carries a unique way of knowing and perceiving the world, Kmett says.
“Learning my language is essentially reclaiming my ability to think as an Ojibwe person,” Kmett says. “And in coming into that way of knowing, the impacts of separation from volumes of our epistemology, sometimes across generations, that's when the root of many compounding negative outcomes stemming from colonization become apparent — a disconnection from a part of ourselves.
“To take back our language is an act of healing, and is among the most valuable things I can gift to my own children.”
Kmett has spoken to his children solely in Ojibwe since before they were born. For much of the past eight years, he has immersed himself in the language while raising them to become modern first-language OjibwemowinOjibwemowin is a term for the Ojibwe language. speakers. Together, he and his partner are raising their children trilingually, using an adaptation of the One Parent One Language methodologyIn the One Parent One Language approach, each parent consistently speaks only one designated language to the child. The purpose is to give the child balanced and consistent exposure to multiple languages, which they pick up naturally through conversation., with Kmett speaking Ojibwe, his partner speaking Spanish and the children also learning English.
One mission, many paths
While serving as a co-founding parent of Gookonaanig Endaawaad — an early childhood Ojibwe language nestA language nest is an early childhood program that teaches a rare or endangered language to young children through full immersion. Fluent older speakers, often elders, care for and speak exclusively with the children in the target language to pass down linguistic and cultural traditions at the Fond du Lac Reservation — and helping establish Endazhi-Nitaawiging Charter School on his home reservation of Red Lake, Kmett completed a master’s degree in Indigenous education through ASU Online.
He says courses in Indigenous education and language revitalization helped him connect years of lived experience with broader scholarship. Readings by President's Professor Bryan Brayboy were especially influential.
“His articles forced me to think about our language within the framework of Indigenous knowledge systems,” Kmett said. “I contemplated and locked in on what aspects of our language tie into our ways of knowing, our ways of being, our ways of valuing that are different from the rest of the world.”
Since graduating, Kmett has continued expanding that work in many directions. He previously served as Endazhi-Nitaawiging Charter School's curriculum designer and environmental education coordinator. Today, he is helping guide “Weweni Gidashandimin: We Nourish Each Other,” an Ojibwe nutrition curriculum with the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health's Great Lakes hub.
Beyond curriculum development, Kmett advises organizations on relational approaches to land, food systems and culturally grounded education. He also presents internationally on Indigenous language revitalization, child-rearing and food sovereignty.
His creative projects include serving as a cultural consultant and actor for the award-winning short film “Ish Meets a Mermaid” and completing an Ojibwe translation of Thomas Peacock's children's book “A Dream For You,” which will be published this fall by Black Bears and Blueberries Publishing.
In recognition of his work, he received the Indigenous Language Stewardship Award from the Tiwahe Foundation and LatinoLEAD in 2025. A year later, he was named a Bush Fellow, a prestigious honor that will support his continued leadership in Indigenous education.
Remembering why
While Kmett’s work continues to grow and earn recognition, the reasons he continues it will always be close to home. Every time he goes to the local tribal clinic at Fond du Lac, he passes by a photo of the St. Mary’s Mission School in Red Lake. Sitting on the front steps are Ojibwe children from generations past, with shorn hair and solemn faces, alongside Father Thomas Borgerding.
The images remind him of what was taken, but they also remind him to keep going.
“This is why we're doing what we're doing,” he says. “To bring back our language and culture for the generations to come.”
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