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atlanticcanada · 3 years

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Mi'kmaq dub of animated film 'Chicken Run' helps keep Indigenous language alive

Ten years after two Nova Scotians decided to dub the popular animated film "Chicken Run" into the Mi'kmaq language, their version of the adventure comedy has become a cult hit that continues to spark learning.

Tom Johnson said it was in 2011 that he and his wife Carol Anne Johnson first began playing with the idea of translating the tale of a chicken escape into the Indigenous language. It was a do-it-yourself venture without any official sanction from the studio.

"We're a decade (into) hiding because we thought we were pirates," Tom Johnson said with a laugh in a recent interview.

A tweet this month from Peter Lord, the British co-director of "Chicken Run," suggests they have nothing left to fear. "What a wonderful story!" Lord wrote after reading a media report on the Mi'kmaq version.

Johnson said they were initially inspired to tackle the project by his brother, who had previously made a Mi'kmaq version of the 1995 Disney film, "Gordy." His brother proposed they tackle "Chicken Run," first released in 2000.

In a studio housed in the garage of their home on Cape Breton's Eskasoni First Nation, Johnson said he started with a single line of the film. He later called his wife over, and it wasn't long before they were spending several hours a night over the course of six weeks, translating and taking on the voices of the barnyard characters.

Carol Anne Johnson took the lead on translation, which presented its challenges. "If we were to use the same idioms, (it) wouldn't come out the same way, and they wouldn't get the same laugh if we were to translate it literally," she said.

When they were done, they emailed DreamWorks Pictures, the international distributor of the film, to seek permission for the dub. When they never heard back, they took that as a good sign and began selling DVD copies to recover their costs.

"From there, everyone in our community wanted one," said Carol Anne Johnson, an administrator at the local elementary and middle school. Parents used the movie to introduce the Mi'kmaq language to their children, who would repeat lines from the film and try to make the same jokes. Today, the Johnsons give away digital versions.

Tom Johnson, who works for the local fish and wildlife commission, said they've had requests for copies from as far away as British Columbia and Los Angeles.

One early viewer was John T. Johnson, a cousin of Tom Johnson, who said he got a disc as soon as he heard about the dub.

"That night I went home and played it for my wife, and my daughter listened to it. (I was) happy to see something in Mi'kmaq," he said. "You get goosebumps watching it."

He said the family speaks Mi'kmaq fluently at home, but he did get the chance to teach his daughter a few words while she watched the dubbed version of the film. "I think we saw 'Chicken Run' in the English version before, but then we watched (the dub) and she was in awe ... to hear the chickens speak in Mi'kmaq," he said.

For Bernie Francis, a linguist specialized in the Mi'kmaq language, exposing children to sound of the language is crucial to its preservation. "It's not the elders that carry the language, it's the children," he said. Efforts like the dubbed movie are invaluable resources to engage children with the language, Francis added.

Another Eskasoni resident, Mi'kmaq language immersion teacher Starr Paul, said she first saw the film during a viewing at the local high school when she was an immersion teacher.

"I didn't expect it to be that good," Paul said during a recent interview. "I haven't even seen the English version of it. I just know the whole storyline in Mi'kmaq."

Paul said she has since used the movie in her own classes and found it helped the students engage with the language, but she would like to see more resources.

"The language is really struggling and it's really difficult to have kids be enthusiastic about the language," she said, adding that in her Mi'kmaq immersion school of about 130 students, only a handful speak it fluently.

The decline of the language dates back to the late 1980s, Francis said. In 1989, when Eskasoni had a population of about 2,400, roughly 80 per cent of the population spoke the language, he said. Today, the population has grown to about 4,000, but only 20 per cent of residents speak Mi'kmaq, he added.

"We have to make it so that it's interesting to the child, and that they will actually pay attention," Francis said.

Carol Anne Johnson sees the dubbed film as part of a larger movement to preserve the language, which she describes as an important part of Mi'kmaq identity. But she realizes there is still work to be done.

"Our language, realistically, is in a very vulnerable state," she said. Still, she and her husband see their translation as part of "leaving a legacy of keeping the language strong and making sure that we've done our part."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 31, 2021.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/3j7MgRV

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

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man-creates-dinosaurs · 6 years

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SUPER BIG NEWS: LEGEND OF NC DINOSAURS AND MONSTER BIRDS! Apparently my home state of North Carolina has become a hotbed for cryptozoological activity of the prehistoric survivor variety. This week The News & Observer - the second largest regional paper in NC - reported that a 20-year-old woman in the state capital of Raleigh spotted a pterosaur while waiting for the bus. The above drawing is her depiction of what she claims she saw. This story comes hot of the heels of NC being visited last year by the Japanese paranormal reality TV show What’s This? – Mysteries From Around the World which came for three days in September to hunt for an alleged plesiosaur in Lake Norman which is right outside Charlotte. Pterosaurs and plesiosaurs oh my! Though popularly depicted as a plesiosaur-type creature, the Lake Norman Monster - known affectionately as “Normie” - more closely resembles a large fish based on eyewitness sightings with the most popular candidate being an overgrown catfish. Nevertheless some witnesses have reported seeing a “dinosaur-type” creature in the lake as well. The most common rationale cited by cryptozoologists for the belief that Mesozoic marine reptiles inhabit certain lakes around the world is that these lakes are ancient. And indeed some of them are relatively speaking. Both Loch Ness in Scotland and America’s Lake Champlain - the homes of perhaps the two most famous lake monsters in the world - are both about 10,000-years-old and were formed at the end of the last Great Ice Age. Of course this still makes them far too young to be harboring any kind plesiosaur, the last of which died out 65-million-years ago. This problem is even more pronounced when it comes to Lake Norman which is a man-made lake created between 1959 and 1964 as part of the construction of the Cowans Ford Dam by Duke Energy. Being only 50-years-old there’s no way that Lake Norman could be hiding anything prehistoric! So what accounts for the alleged sightings? If we rule out pranks and hoaxes, the most likely cause seems to be cases of mistaken identity. Deer are common in the Lake Norman and are often seen swimming in the lake. Also large snapping turtles - some big enough that they have occasionally been mistaken for alligators - reside there but despite occasional reports there are no confirmed cases of actual gators in Norman though they do live in NC and can be found in lakes closer to the coast like Lake Waccamaw. Surprisingly freshwater jellyfish do reside in Norman. There’s also the folklore factor. As argued by Michael Meurger in his 1989 book Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-cultural Analysis (co-authored with Claude Gagnon) there is just something about large bodies of water that inspires people to make-up stories about them whether it be that such lakes are bottomless, hide buried treasure, are the final resting place of victims of unsolved murders or harbor a monster. It doesn’t matter if the lake in question is natural or man-made - in fact as pointed out by Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell in their 2006 investigative study Lake Monster Mysteries, Lake Norman is far from the only man-made body of water in the US to allegedly contain a cryptid (p. 151). When it comes to Raleigh’s supposed pterosaurs, similar factors seem to be at work there as well in that we are once again dealing with the familiar phenomena of animal illiteracy. As paleontologist Darren Naish writes in his wonderful little book Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths (2017), one of the side-effects of the widespread popularity of prehistoric animals is that depictions of creatures like pterosaurs are so pervasive that “a great many people… have some concept of what a pterodactyl is, yet are stunningly naive regarding the living animals that live on their own doorstep” (p. 184). This seems to be a perfect summation of the situation we have here. NC is home is a sizable number of large birds including cranes, storks, pelicans, spoonbills, osprey, several types of egrets, herons, hawks, owls, three types of ibis and two types of both vultures and eagles. I live about an hour outside Charlotte and have literally seen most of these birds in my own backyard. They are big and can easily startle people - especially when you open your curtains in the morning and find a crane standing a foot from your window, which is something that actually happened to my mom. But people who aren’t as familiar with the local wildlife or do as much backyard bird watching as I do may not be able identify these birds and think they are seeing a “flying dinosaur.” James Robert Smith, a friend and local author of several fantastic works of paleo-fiction including The Flock (2006) and Withering (2014, under the pen name Robert Mathis Kurtz), related the following story about just such a situation to me when discussing the recent flap of supposed pterosaur sightings…

One of my old friends saw a great blue heron in flight (he’d never seen one) and insisted that he’d seen a pterosaur. I kept trying to convince him that he’d only spotted a heron but he resisted. Finally, one day he saw it again and it landed and he admitted that it was “just a bird.”

Further complicating matters is that in covering this story The News & Observer reached out to creationist Jonathan Whitcomb about the sightings. The issue of creationism isn’t one I’ve addressed on this blog before despite the fact that I regularly deal with the topic seeing how I teach a class on the intersection of dinosaurs and religion. For anyone not familiar with the subject, paleontologist José Luis Sanz offers a sufficient definition of creationism in his book Starring T.Rex describing it as “a political instrument of religious fundamentalists… derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible… which denies any evolutionary dimension to life, the Earth, or the Universe.” (p. 79) Creationism isn’t a very old movement, with its origins in the late 19th-Century, but has nevertheless gained a lot of traction is certain Christian communities in the US. One of the chief claims of creationists like Whitcomb is that dinosaurs and man lived alongside one another (God made them on the same day after all) and that some dinosaurs - and dinosaur contemporaries like pterosaurs and plesiosaurs - are still around today. Whitcomb is particularly infamous for his 2006 book Searching for Ropens in which he argues for the existence of a giant (16 to 23 ft. wingspan) bioluminescent, grave-robbing pterosaur residing in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Whitcomb actually traveled to Papua New Guinea where he collected alleged eyewitness sightings of the Ropen from locals. Many of these locals were Christian converts who appear to have been impressed by Whitcomb’s status as an “important” white missionary (how he fiancees these trips) from America and were eager to testify to him about their encounters with the Ropen which Whitcomb then reinterpreted as encounters with a pterosaur. I say “reinterpreted” because it’s pretty obvious from even just a cursory overview that the Ropen is actually a kind of demon or vampire from the indigenous folklore - the name literally means “demon flier” - that many of the local people still believe in despite - or more likely because of - their conversion to Christianity. According to The News & Observer, Whitcomb claims to have nine different alleged NC pterosaur sightings on file including this most recent Raleigh encounter. The News & Observer reprinted all of these sightings as part of their story and from reading them I’ll say it’s not entirely clear why anyone would seriously think these people had seen a prehistoric winged reptile. But then it’s not clear how on the level Whitcomb is either. One of his key pieces of evidence for the existence of modern-day pterosaurs is a photo of Civil War soldiers standing with a dead pterodactyl, a photo which is incontrovertibly known to be a film prop (not just the pterosaur the whole photo is a prop) made for and used in an episode of the TV series Freaky Links in the late 90s. Loren Coleman actually has the prop pterosaur hanging in his International Cryptozoology Museum in Main. Nevertheless Whitcomb dogmatically maintains the photo is real! Naturally I’d love it if my home state harbored living non-avian dinosaurs and related creatures but the prospect is more then unlikely. So I guess I’ll just have to be content with the multiple avian dinosaurs I get to see everyday in my own backyard. And for anyone who doesn’t “get” the joke which is this post’s title I explain it here.

#pterosaur #pterodactyl #pteranodon #plesiosaur #cryptozoology #dinosaurs #dinosaur #darren naish #james robert smith #lake monster #north carolina #creationism #creationist nonsense #ropen #raleigh #lake norman #lake norman monster

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