Inside Minneapolis’s Only Ojibwe Language Immersion Preschool Program (Hint: It’s Outside)
What the Sugar Bush Has to Do With Preschool
It’s mid-March at Porky’s Sugarbush, where woodsmoke mingles with the sweet smell of heated maple sap. Candy-colored buckets hang from gray-brown tree trunks, catching a slow drip of sap. Nearby, children’s voices rise and fall in laughter and language that has been spoken on this land for thousands of years.
This is a learning day for the Ojibwe immersion classroom from Four Directions Preschool, led by our partner Wicoie Nandagikendan. Right now, young learners from Minneapolis have the opportunity to run through the snow, mix maple syrup into soft sugar, and offer tobacco to the maple trees in thanks for their gifts. It’s the Anishinaabe new year: a time to celebrate the generosity of the land and the ways all living things depend on one another.
How Wicoie Nandagikendan Is Raising the Next Generation of Ojibwe Speakers
Whether on East Lake Street or at the sugar bush, young children at Four Directions Preschool are always learning. Their most important lessons happen in relationship: by weaving care and knowledge together.
That is exactly what Wicoie Nandagikendan brings to Four Directions. Founded in 2006, Wicoie Nandagikendan is the first Indigenous urban preschool immersion program in Minneapolis and one of the only Ojibwe language immersion early childhood programs in the country. Ojibwemowin is more than a subject on the schedule. It is the language through which children experience everything, inside the classroom and out.
For children in Wicoie Nandagikendan’s classroom, learning in Ojibwe means deepening the way they relate with the world and sustain connections to family and community across time. With fewer than 25 first-language Ojibwe speakers remaining in the United States, that connection is both precious and urgent.
“Every child in this classroom has the potential to be a fluent Ojibwe speaker, and many already are,” says Liz Zinsli, lead teacher at Wicoie Nandagikendan. “We are creating a pathway for the language to live on through the children.”
The Benefits of Ojibwe Language Immersion for Young Children
Research confirms what families already know: children in immersion programs do more than keep pace with their peers—they thrive. Bilingual children develop stronger executive function skills, which include the ability to focus, think before acting, solve problems, and regulate impulses. They are more flexible and creative thinkers, better at reading context and responding to the needs of the people around them. Learning a second language, it turns out, makes children better at being human with each other.
For Native American children, the benefits run even deeper. The right to be educated in their own language is one that American Indian communities have had to fight to reclaim. Its restoration is still recent, still unfolding, and still urgent.*
What is happening in Wicoie Nandagikendan’s classroom is part of that reclamation. And on a spring morning at Porky’s Sugarbush, it looks like children running through the snow, singing songs in Ojibwe, and getting a taste of fresh maple sugar.
How Four Directions Preschool Builds on Family and Cultural Strengths
At Four Directions, honoring family and cultural strengths lives at the heart of The Family Partnership’s two-generation approach. Supporting a preschooler means supporting their whole family: with the unique gifts they’ve inherited and the unique visions they hold for the future. “South Minneapolis is home to a rich mosaic of cultures, languages, and lived experiences,” says Sarah Werner, Senior Director of Four Directions Preschool. “And that diversity is one of our community’s greatest strengths. Honoring that means being intentional: hiring staff who reflect the community, celebrating the strengths every child and family brings, and being a true partner to families in addressing whatever stands between a child and their full potential.”
Honoring [each culture] means being intentional: hiring staff who reflect the community, celebrating the strengths every child and family brings, and being a true partner to families in addressing whatever stands between a child and their full potential.
Sarah Werner, Senior Director of Four Directions Preschool
When a child knows their language, practices, and place in a long lineage of people who came before them, they hold something that will carry them for a lifetime. The four-year-olds learning Ojibwe today will grow up to be parents and elders themselves, passing on to the youngest generation what was passed on to them. At Four Directions, we are honored to provide a home where that continuum of knowledge is nurtured, and where the gifts of the land, family, and community form the foundation that everything else is built on.
*Learn more about the history of Native American boarding schools and ongoing healing efforts at the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
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On any given day, the Instagram feeds of Four Directions Preschool and Wicoie Nandagikendan share the joys of our early childhood programming. Follow both to stay close to the children, families, and community at the heart of this work.