History of Gimaa Radio
CHYF 88.9FM broadcasting from M'Chigeeng, Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island, Ontario) in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe/Odawa).
Gimaa Radio was the brain-child of Carl Beam, a residential school survivor and artist who recognized how important the Ojibwe language was and what its retention meant for a person’s identity, culture, confidence and self-expression. Beam, his wife Ann and two friends developed the idea of the Anishinabemowin radio station to help listeners improve their fluency in “the original people’s language” and to serve as a language and cultural recovery tool.
“He started it with Radio Free Berkley, a group down in California (that) provides radio broadcasting systems for Indigenous people mainly down in South America,” says Anong Beam, Carl Beam’s daughter. “It kind of got off the ground but it wasn’t really feasible and the licensing aspect wasn’t there.”
After her father passed away in 2005, Anong and her husband Mark Larochelle began working to obtain a radio licence through the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
“In 2007 we bought the proper equipment, a transmitter, an antenna and an amplifier and we started the CRTC paperwork,” Anong says. “About five years later we got approved for the licence. So we had the CRTC licence, we had the equipment but we didn’t quite have the proper technology, the computers to run it. We were running it on just an iPad loop that played a playlist of Anishinabe programming.”
Anong and Larochelle donated Gimaa Radio to the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising this past June (June 2014) after realizing they needed to form partnerships to make it more serviceable for the community.
“The idea is to turn (Gimaa Radio) into a tool that can contemporize the language so it is not just about preserving the history or preserving the past, although they would still do that, but to bring it into modern times.”
Gimaa Radio was relaunched at the Three Fires Gathering last August (2014) as a local radio station in M’Chigeeng and an online radio station available at www.gimaaradio.ca will be re-launched very soon.
We feel the online portion of the station is very important because of the limited reach of the FM transmitter itself.
As of this date, (July 10th, 2023) the radio station is on a continuous loop with about 3 weeks worth of content that is shuffled. We are committed to adding 300 hours worth of new content each year and are working hard to reach that goal.
24January 2024
I came across this very interesting video on YouTube while researching the history of Gimaa Radio. YouTube Video - The Art & Legacy of Carl Beam
I found a Facebook Page devoted to this as well, by the same guys that did the YouTube video above Facebook page Aakideh Carl Beam information