You are here: Home » About John Paul Montano

About John Paul Montano

John Paul Montano photo

John Paul Montano

John Paul Montano has spent most of the last ten years acquiring the Nishnaabe language from his mentor, Barbara Nolan. Together, they have successfully transferred the language forward, across one generation – from Barbara to John Paul. He is profoundly grateful to be a speaker of Nishnaabemwin.

John Paul is an experienced language researcher, immersion program developer and a coach of immersion instructors:

Teaching first-speakers of Nishnaabemwin - He’s actively involved in teaching first-speakers of Nishnaabemwin how to successfully integrate their immersion instruction with video and the web in order to pass their language on to others.

2,000 hours of Nishnaabe-language immersion video - John Paul is a member of a team of Nishnaabe-language immersion instructors attempting to produce 2,000 hours of Nishnaabe-language immersion video to be placed on the web, freely viewable by all. Details of this exciting project will be announced sometime in the Autumn of 2013. If you’re a speaker of Nishnaabemwin and you’d like to contribute immersion video to this project, please contact John Paul. He’d love to hear from you! :)

Creating Nishnaabe-language animations with NishAnimate - He’s a founding member of an experimental open source project called NishAnimate, which is attempting to develop an application that will be able to convert audio-accompanied Nishnaabe-language text into animated Nishnaabe-language immersion video. NishAnimate will be free to use and is planned to be available for other indigenous languages. More details about this project will be available this Summer.

Tweeting in Nishnaabemwin with Tweet2Learn - Additionally, John Paul is an ongoing Nishnaabe-language contributor to an Indigenous Tweets project called Tweet2Learn, which is a website/mobile app that makes it easier for people to use their native language on Twitter. If you’d like to contribute to Tweet2Learn, Kevin Scannell would be quite happy to hear from you! :)