Feds frustrate Indigenous language revitalization

Indigenous languages in Canada are dying. Of the 60 languages that exist across the country, nearly all were declared endangered—some of them critically—well over a decade ago by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, and most still maintain that status.

Census data from 2011 also show a decline in the numbers of fluent speakers of the majority of languages, and show an even greater decline in the numbers of people speaking an Aboriginal language as their first language.

So where has Canada gone wrong?

According to Linda Cree, a language consultant for the Assembly of First Nations, lack of funding has been the major obstacle, and though the AFN has been petitioning the federal government since as far back as the 1980s, they’ve experienced serious setbacks along the way.

“As is often the reason used by most federal departments dealing with Indigenous programs and services, they ‘lost’ reports repeatedly by regions,” Cree said in an email to Windspeaker. “This became a convenient excuse to disengage with the AFN… but we fought them and resubmitted all their lost reports and won most of what was owing,” she said.

Cree also forwarded documents which show that Canadian Heritage—a branch of the federal government responsible for funding arts and cultural projects—withheld the over $1 million from the AFN on the grounds of missing documentation, for the years between 2005 and 2009.

The AFN was also “removed” from participating in any languages and culture activities by Canadian Heritage, with Canadian Heritage telling the AFN each region in Canada wanted to deal with CH directly, rather than go through the AFN as a third-party manager, she said.

Most of the reports submitted, both to the U.N. and to the Government of Canada, specifically address the unequal distribution of funding for language programs in the country—the emphasis from the government being most often upon bilingualism with French and English-immersion programs, rather than programs for Indigenous populations wanting to speak Indigenous languages.

In one report to the United Nations, the AFN targeted a specific policy—The Roadmap for Canada’s Linguistic Duality: Acting for the Future— calling it “discriminatory, assimilative… and the causal factor in the destruction of all Indigenous languages, cultures and histories” because of its likeness to colonial sentiment.

But despite setbacks, Cree said the AFN is committed to working for and advocating on behalf of Indigenous languages, and the AFN does make note of many smaller successes on their website, including the increase in children ages five to 14 who speak an Indigenous language from 2006-2011 (taken from the 2011 Canadian Census), and the fact that four provinces and territories have either recognized the importance of Indigenous languages, or declared them official, under provincial legislation.

But probably the most astonishing success to date, not recorded on the AFN website, but found on UNESCO’s Atlas of World Languages in Danger, is the success of the Huron-Wyandot language. Huron-Wyandot is spoken in the community of Wendake, Que., and was once considered completely extinct, but has since found its way back into the hearts and minds of the people there.

John Steckley, a retired professor from Humber College in Toronto, is one of the people who was moved to learn the language. Though he is a scholar and not a community member, he has been working on the language since 1974, and is the most fluent speaker alive today. But he attributes the success of the revitalization to the grassroots efforts of the people of Wendake.

“The community felt the need, because they called me. In the early 1990s, I was asked to do workshops. And there was a major project that brought together people from different communities, brought linguists together and brought different cultural aspects together... It was very powerful,” he said.

The major issue that resulted in the loss of the language in the first place, said Steckley, was the isolation of the community members, and the lack of younger members who were picking up the language as older generations died off—not unlike what has happened with many other Indigenous communities.

“In the Wendake community, they are just outside a major city. They have a community of about 1,000, but were long cut off from other groups who ended up in Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma...

“So the oppression that happened on all the languages was particularly potent when you have one community of speakers… And the last speaker there probably died in the early 20th century,” he said.

And surprisingly, while colonization was wiping out the language, Jesuit missionaries were also creating elaborate dictionaries of the language, said Steckley, which has been the key piece for study of the language today.

“I like what I hear people say… It’s that the language was sleeping and we are waking it up,” he said.

There are also two other languages on UNESCO’s map which were declared extinct, but did not make a comeback. Tsetsaut was spoken on the Northwest coast of B.C. near the town of Stewart, while Pentlatch was spoken on Vancouver Island around Courtenay, B.C.

Missing from the site, however, is any information on the Ski:xs language, which Margaret Anderson, a retired professor from the University of Northern British Columbia, says is also nearly extinct.

Anderson’s language of choice is Sm’algyax—from the Tsimshian family—and while she tends to a website called Sm’algyax Living Legacy Talking Dictionary, she is aware of the demise of the Ski:xs language. Ski:xs, too, is from the Tsimshian family, but has no fluent speakers left and only a few beginners in the language now picking it up through recorded material, she said.

“The last speaker of Ski:xs died last year, in her late 90s, and still living on her own… But she worked with a young linguist who did hours and hours of recordings. And she had worked with another linguist in the 1960s. who recorded a number of CDs… because he was trying to do a dictionary like ours,” said Anderson.

As for Sm’algyax, there are a little over 100 fluent speakers left, and they’ve been using material recorded in the 1930s and 1940s to revive it, said Anderson. She will be updating her website soon and is working on a project with Simon Fraser University to “double” the documentation that currently exists on Sm’algyax.

For Anderson, language revival is about more than just language.

“It’s beyond vocabulary,” said Anderson. “It’s an issue of words that describe the world around us. In Sm’algyax there’s a whole set of words that are prefixes that explain how people move… out from shore, towards the shore, along the shore, up from the shore or down. It’s more than a simple word like walk or runÖ You get an extra richness in talking about movement on the land,” she said.