Bemidji State graduate teaches Ojibwe language at Red Lake Nation College

Mitchell Johnson, known as Sonny, is now teaching Ojibwe language and Anishinaabe Studies at Red Lake Nation College after graduating from Bemidji State University in 2026. Bemidji State highlighted his path on July 2, showing how a student who once questioned why Native stories were missing from his own education has moved into the front of the classroom.

That shift carries direct weight in Beltrami County and across northern Minnesota. Johnson is teaching at Red Lake Nation College, a two-year tribal college on the shores of Red Lake that centers Ojibwe language and culture in its mission while also offering globally relevant courses. The college is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, and an HLC action letter dated Jan. 10, 2025, recorded an Institutional Actions Council decision effective Jan. 6, 2025.

Johnson’s new role lands inside an existing language-revitalization effort already underway in Red Lake. Minnesota Legacy records show a Red Lake Nation Ojibwemowin Revitalization Project with $80,750 in fiscal year 2024 funding, running from July 2024 through June 2025. The project included community language efforts, cultural events, an Ojibwe language immersion camp and online learning, giving students and families more places to hear and use the language outside a single classroom.

State language-revitalization pages also say Minnesota appropriated grants to preserve Dakota and Ojibwe languages and support education and immersion programs. In that setting, Johnson is not starting from scratch. He is joining a regional infrastructure that already includes classrooms, camps, cultural programming and digital tools meant to keep Ojibwemowin in daily circulation.

One of those tools is the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, which the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council highlights as a searchable talking Ojibwe-English dictionary with voices of Ojibwe speakers. For a graduate like Johnson, that means the work now reaches from Bemidji State into Red Lake classrooms and into the broader network of teachers, elders and students trying to restore language that was often pushed aside in formal schooling.

Johnson’s career arc gives Bemidji-area education a concrete example of repair. A student who did not see his own history reflected in school is now helping teach it, with his work adding another local instructor to the effort to keep Ojibwe language and Anishinaabe knowledge alive for the next generation.