When Dr. Kevin Brousseau isn’t working as the only on-duty physician at the Healing Centre in Oujé-Bougoumou, a municipality in the Eeyou Istchee territory of central Quebec, he puts his linguistics degrees to good use by editing the world’s largest Cree dictionary.
“Before even getting these degrees, I had actually been compiling lists of words in my own dialect since I was a teenager,” says Brousseau, whose family hails from the neighbouring Eeyou Istchee municipality of Waswanipi. “I guess it was always a plan to work on dictionaries.”
He switched to medicine in his 30s to serve Cree patients in their mother tongue but continued working as editor of the Moose Cree dictionary, which was updated to its fourth edition in November 2025. The new release includes more than 34,000 Cree terms translated to English and around 5,500 English to Cree entries that Brousseau has collected for the project since 2012.
Beyond splitting his attention between these two jobs and publishing academic works on old Cree with the Canadian Museum of History, Brousseau is facing many obstacles in his mission to help Cree people learn their language. Low numbers of fluent Cree speakers, a lack of modern texts that help people practice the language, and underfunding for Indigenous cultural projects have required Brousseau and Moose Cree First Nation to find clever solutions while paying for the project themselves.
And Brousseau says they’re far from the only Indigenous community facing these challenges in Canada.
Bringing the Moose Cree dictionary to life
According to Brousseau, the dictionary’s bilingual structure is necessary to make it accessible for Moose Cree speakers. He says most people in Moose Factory, Ont., located on the southern tip of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, only read and speak English.
“We’re trying to create the documentation in order for people to pick up the language. But if you were to ask for a local translator to translate the book’s introduction into the local dialect, you would be hard pressed to find one,” he says.
This is partially because Moose Cree doesn’t have much literary content. Most dictionaries need evidence that words are used across novels, the news, or other texts, but Brousseau couldn’t find modern Moose Cree literature written after the 1970s.
To fill this gap, Brousseau has recorded most words by talking with the community’s fluent speakers. He often spent hours on the phone with contributors asking for exhaustive lists of terms, a process that’s necessary because of how Cree differs from languages such as English.
Rather than giving multiple meanings to one word, Cree creates a new word each time it gains new context. Some Cree words have so much contextual information that they translate to full sentences in English. For instance, Brousseau says maškek (ᒪᔥᑫᒄ) translates to “muskeg” — a type of North American bog named after the Cree word — while akāmaškek (ᐊᑳᒪᔥᑫᒃ) means “across the muskeg” and akāmaškekaham (ᐊᑳᒪᔥᑫᑲᐦᐊᒻ) represents “he/she walks across the muskeg.”
Brousseau says some speakers enjoyed exploring “the limits of their imagination” by giving him very specific words, especially when they had decades of experience in fields such as aeronautics or aquaculture.
“Always trying to find humour in whatever we’re doing is part of the culture, so some people find it funny,” Brousseau says of the word collection process. “Some people find it very boring.”
Similarly to Moose Cree literary content, the number of current fluent speakers is limited. Geraldine Govender, the project manager for the dictionary, says Moose Factory has around 70 people fluent in Moose Cree out of its 5,000 residents. Almost all those speakers are elders.
Govender says this ratio was caused by residential schools and government policies that tried to systematically eradicate Cree people’s cultures and languages.
“Moose Factory is the oldest English-speaking settlement in Ontario… We’ve had a lot of impact from colonization since 1673,” Govender says. “The message that was constantly given around me was, ‘Don’t speak Cree to your kids. It’s not going to help them.’”
But Moose Factory’s elders are getting older. Brousseau says he’s bonded with contributors over the years, so the recent deaths of elders have hit him hard.
“I’ve had messages from the family who thanked me for the years of friendship… Some of these elderly people are lonely sitting at home,” Brousseau says, voice cracking. “Knowing that I can call and uplift their day once in a while and have a conversation, hear a couple of laughs, and then get to work on a dictionary for 15 to 20 minutes… it is a rewarding part of the job for sure.
“I’m just thankful that Geraldine and I were able to create this project at a time when they were still around.”
New Cree speakers need more than a dictionary, says Brousseau
Brousseau believes the dictionary isn’t enough to support the Moose Cree dialect on its own. He explains it’s a tool that will only help new speakers if they can apply their skills with grammar books or during workshops.
To that end, Brousseau helped local elders translate Robert Munsch books like Thomas’ Snowsuit and Show and Tell into syllabics, a writing system invented in the early 1800s for Cree and other Indigenous languages. Brousseau also found a collection of 1930s adult Cree texts collected by linguist Truman Michelson and stored in the Smithsonian Institute Archives. Brousseau updated these texts’ syllabic writings for modern readers.
To further support Cree speakers, Govender says Moose Cree First Nation is organizing language immersion camps and conversational sessions where they can practice together. The community also launched the “Moose Cree Language App” with spoken samples of some words and a searchable dictionary that’s available online. The print version is free for Moose Cree members.
“It just seems like a strange concept that we would charge people — our people — to be able to have the resources they need to learn the language,” Govender says. “Some people would not be able to afford it at all.”
These kinds of resources have helped people like Jocelyn Cheechoo learn Cree. Born and raised in Moose Factory before moving to Thunder Bay for work, Cheechoo says her vocabulary classes from kindergarten to grade eight didn't prepare her to ask questions in Moose Cree when her grandparents sparked casual conversations or told stories from their family history in the dialect.
Now that she’s taking conversational courses, Cheechoo is emboldened to practice with fluent speakers, rather than afraid of being laughed at for not knowing the language.
“[People laughed at me] a couple of times, but it only took once or twice for me to not want to try,” recalls Cheechoo. “Speakers are more supportive now because they see, I guess, that the language is not being spoken as much anymore.”
Despite the positive impact of language programs on new learners, Govender says they’ve been hard to fund in Moose Factory.
She spent 17 years as the director and sole employee of Moose Cree First Nation’s language and cultural programs department before she could hire two more people. The community paid for the dictionary using its own revenue, a resource Govender says most other Indigenous communities don’t have.
Govender says she wants the Canadian government to fund more Indigenous language programs such as the dictionary and conversational sessions. But seeing people like Cheechoo learn to speak Cree, and watching projects like the dictionary grow, gives Govender hope Moose Cree will flourish.
“There’s such a potential. Now I have two people working with me — it would be nice if we had more, but we do what we can with what we have,” she says, adding that she’s received enthusiastic support from the community’s elders. “I really believe in this.”
The nationwide struggle to fund Indigenous language projects
Moose Cree First Nation is only one of the many Indigenous communities in Canada whose language projects remain underfunded despite low fluency rates and the legacy of colonialism.
Out of the nearly 90 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, around 75 per cent are definitely, severely, or critically endangered, according to the Department of Canadian Heritage and UNESCO. This means children don’t learn the language as a mother tongue and fluent speakers are often grandparents or from older generations.
Yet over the course of five years starting in 2024, the federal government proposed investing $225 million to revitalize both Indigenous languages and culture, while promising to delegate more than $1.4 billion towards supporting minority- and secondary-language education for Official Language minority communities.
Funding for Indigenous communities has also been decreasing. The $225 million investment was 32.5 per cent lower than the funds promised to revitalizing Indigenous languages in the 2019 budget.
Further, in 2024-25, Canadian Heritage planned to invest $52.6 million in revitalizing First Nations languages, down from $118.3 million the previous year according to Senator Bernadette Clement in a September 2025 Senate debate’s question period.
Clement is a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples (APPA). During the question period, she asked the then-Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Steven Guilbeault, about Canadian Heritage’s funding decrease for First Nations languages between 2023 and 2024. According to Clement, Guilbeault didn't dispute the fact funding is decreasing.
David Larose, a media relations advisor for Canadian Heritage, wrote in an email statement to La Converse that this decrease is because the 2021 budget’s “time-limited investments” expired in 2023-2024. He said the $52.6 million figure Clement presented is “limited” to the 2019 and 2021 budgets, and it “omits the additional $32.8 million provided by Budget 2024” to support First Nations languages.
Larose also wrote that Indigenous languages get “ongoing” annual funding that continues to be provided after the “time-limited investments” in budgets. This “ongoing” funding increased from $115.7 million in 2019 to $162.7 million in 2024, he wrote. In total, Larose wrote that Canadian Heritage is spending “just over $1 billion” to revitalize Indigenous languages between 2019 and 2029.
Steven Guilbeault and Canadian Heritage both declined La Converse’s request for an interview.
Clement acknowledges that the government has “a lot of priorities related to the economy” on the international scale that make it harder to prioritize funding for Indigenous language revitalization projects.
“Every time we turn on the news it feels like there’s another existential threat to our economy,” she says. “My fear, in terms of that, is that a lot of the groups that weren’t getting the attention they needed even before this existential threat will fall even further in terms of priorities.”
Clement has travelled across Canada to talk about language revitalization efforts with various Indigenous communities. She often heard from community members that they appreciated the funding they could get, but the government only supported individual projects similar in scope to the Moose Cree dictionary, rather than lasting solutions.
“The risk is that communities can’t plan for themselves, can’t set long-term plans around how they want to work on their particular language in their community. The short-term project based funding doesn’t work to support that,” Clement explains. “It needs to be longer term, and it needs to be sustainable.”
In an email statement to La Converse, Commissioner of Indigenous Languages Ronald E. Ignace agreed with Clement. He wrote that long-term funding is “urgently needed to ensure no Indigenous language is left behind” and to help address the damage from colonialism.
“Fiscal prudence shouldn't come at the expense of Indigenous peoples and their languages. Especially given that the current critical state of Indigenous languages is the direct result of a history of targeted government policies and practices of assimilation,” the commissioner wrote.
Ignace was not available for an interview.
Estimating the cost of revitalizing Indigenous languages
In September 2022, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) contracted Daniel J. Brant & Associates to create a cost analysis estimating the long-term financial investments needed to revitalize Indigenous languages in Canada. Brant has served as Chief Administrative Officer for the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte and as a policy advisor to federal and Deputy Ministers. Brant also provided the figures about First Nations funding that Clement used during the question period with Guilbeault.
The model splits funding in two parts: one part would support local services based on each community’s needs and size, and the other would install nine “hubs” across the country to serve as resource centres for communities in the same regions and language groups.
The AFN estimates both categories combined would cost around $2 billion annually. If implemented in the federal 2025-26 budget, this would increase the $486.9 billion in planned government spending by around 0.4 per cent.
Brant says the probability that the government would adopt AFN’s model is “questionable.”
“It would have to receive tremendous amounts of support from existing structural systems within government,” Brant says. “We have not seen that level of support on any front, whether it’s language or education or housing or justice.”
The model also had to qualify its estimates by clarifying that national data about fluency rates for Indigenous languages is limited. Brant explains that specific regions and communities have collected their own data, but it is hard to use for national comparisons since each community treats and monitors its languages differently. The 2016 federal census data AFN used had a similar problem.
“They asked a question in there: ‘Can you converse, or do you converse, in an Indigenous language?’ That question can be interpreted so many ways,” Brant says, while specifying that to decide whether someone is fluent depends on personal and community factors.
After releasing the report, AFN submitted the model to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs (INAN). The model helped INAN write recommendation number 10 in its June 2023 House of Commons report, which asked the federal government to “take immediate action” on long-term funding for Indigenous languages. The government’s October 2023 response to the report did not address AFN’s model.
Brant says AFN wrote follow-up papers and submitted them to the government, but he hasn’t seen meaningful responses from federal representatives.
Larose wrote in his statement for Canadian Heritage that the department is aware of AFN’s model but didn't comment on it further.
Despite this push for further funding, Brousseau doesn’t believe money alone to be the solution. He says what communities “really need is a way to develop expertise” in recording and teaching their languages. Otherwise, misunderstandings about how to spell or pronounce some words, which Brousseau calls a “symptom of language loss,” will slow progress.
“‘[In] my community, we say this, [in] your community, you say that,’ but really both communities said both words if you speak to people who are over 80 years old… You need the proper training, the competence to [revitalize a language], and unfortunately that’s something that’s becoming increasingly rare as the very fluent speakers are getting older,” he says. “I see my job as a lexicographer as somebody who’s documenting the language to ensure it is still there in the future.”
