Race to save First Nations languages
Ottawa kicks in funding, but is it enough to help?
Janine Metallic says that something magical happens when she hears the Mi’kmaq language spoken.
She may live in Montreal now, about 800 kilometres southwest from her home in the Listuguj First Nation on the Gaspe Peninsula, but the words carry her to that distant place.
“When I hear the language, it immediately brings me back home,” said Metallic, a PhD student at McGill University. “The way we tell jokes, the way we tell stories, there’s a whole world view embedded in those words. It’s a different reflection of the world.”
In 2011, Metallic partnered with McGill’s linguistics department for a project on the Mi’kmaq language. Working with a small class, Metallic was able to guide students through the mechanics and subtleties of Mi’kmaq and, in return, they would help with efforts to revitalize the language in Listuguj — where the use of Mi’kmaq has been in a state of decline for decades.
The study and revitalization of indigenous languages is part of a conference beginning next Friday at Universite du Quebec a Montreal. The conference will host linguists from across the continent as they explore the nuts and bolts of how indigenous languages work, how we record them and how we might be able to preserve them.
“To ask a linguist what it might mean for (Canada) to lose an indigenous language, that’s like asking a biologist what it might mean for the rainforest to disappear,” said Richard Compton, the Universite du Quebec a Montreal linguistics professor who’s organizing the conference. “It’s such a critical part of the vitality and culture of this country.”
Compton is working on a dictionary that has compiled about 8,000 words in Kangiryuarmiut — a language used by indigenous people in Canada’s remote northwest.
Metallic, 43, is one of the few people of her generation in Listuguj that learned to speak Mi’kmaq from her parents. By the 1970s, children in the Mi’kmaq territory were schooled off-reserve after a fire burned down the local school.
This contributed to an erosion of the language — one that started with the residential school system and other assimilationist policies — and it mirrored what was happening in reserves across Canada.
“It was important for my family that if we were going to be schooled in English, we had to preserve our language,” Metallic said.
“Our household policy was Mi’kmaq only.
“The second we got off the school bus and entered our home, it was only Mi’kmaq.
“Other parents didn’t all feel that way. They thought, ‘You need English to succeed.’”
These days, in Listuguj, Metallic’s mother and her sister are teaching a new generation to speak the language of their ancestors. In last week’s budget, the federal government announced annual grants of $5 million to promote aboriginal languages, but some argue that doesn’t go far enough.
Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaq lawyer and academic, wrote in a blog post Wednesday that the real cost of reinvigorating Canada’s 53 aboriginal languages could be in the billions.
The way we tell jokes, the way we tell stories, there’ s a whole world view embedded in those words. It’s a different reflection of the world.
JANINE METALLIC
PHD STUDENT, MCGILL UNIVERSITY