Mohawk sisters aim to revitalize language through video game

Playing video games is fun, but what if you could learn a language at the same time? That’s what two Mohawk sisters from Kanesatake — west of Montreal — are helping people do.

Kahentawaks and Wennekerakon Tiewishaw are sisters from Kanesatake, Que. that are developing video games to revitalize the Mohawk language, a language their parents wanted them so badly to learn but lack of practice made them lose it.

Their love of video games and their culture made them want to build something that would serve their Indigenous communities across Canada.

“You have this library, if you can imagine, like something very similar to the Netflix interface where you open it up and you see like, here are all the games that will teach you to speak Mohawk, and then here’s all the video games that will teach you how to play, how to speak. I mean, maybe a national demo in all and all these different indigenous languages,” explained Kahentawaks Tiewishaw, co-creator of Revital Software.

Growing up, the Tiewishaw kids attended a Mohawk school. Their parent’s who don’t speak the language wanted to give their children an opportunity they missed out on. But a lack of practice made them lose the ability to speak.

“It’s a situation is with my sister and I and all of my siblings really is that despite this immersion program that we were a part of as children, none of us can speak Mohawk because we didn’t have the resources to be able to practice,” said Tiewishaw.

The sisters want to give future generations something they didn’t have growing up.

“Oh, the kids are spending so much time in front of the TV. Like, why don’t you study your Mohawk? Why don’t you do some of your schoolwork and all that kind of stuff? So I would end up thinking like, well, if there were Mohawk video games, I’d be playing those, but there aren’t any, right?”

The Mohawk language has fewer than 4,000 speakers worldwide – but through Revital Software – this could change.

“We also understand that a lot of indigenous people in Canada, we’re in the same boat where our languages are like on the verge of extinction. Right. And part of our way of contributing to help language revitalization is by creating indigenous language media. So we can like it’s we don’t want our languages to be just something that you hear in school or in like an immersion type of context. The language really, if it’s going to be a living language, has to be brought back into people’s homes and this is how we plan to do it,” explained Tiewishaw.

“If you think about it, these video games will reach people when they’re available, you know, like they can learn on their own terms. And another thing about that is there’s like a lot of intergenerational trauma around language, like not being feeling ashamed for not being able to speak it, maybe not being able to find the time to learn. So it can be quite an emotional thing to learn your language.”