KAWENNÍ:IO (Beautiful Words) Lauren Williams ’01 is helping to revive and spread the endangered Mohawk language By Mary K. Nolan Photography by Alex Blum
That was about the extent of Lauren Williams’ Mohawk vocabulary when she was growing up in suburban Toronto, the daughter of an Indigenous mother and non-Indigenous father. Now, Lauren ’01 is a full-time teacher of the endangered Haudenosaunee language—Kanyen’kéha— imparting its beauty and complexity to about 50 students in Grades 4 to 8 at Prince of Wales school in Hamilton. Not all of them are taking the class because they share her First Nations heritage or 34
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THANK YOU. HORSE. HELLO.