Near-dead Mohawk language gets own university course

WATERLOO — Mohawk is very rarely spoken. The University of Waterloo is taking a small step to help change that.

The school is enrolling 15 students this fall in its first Indigenous language course, a first-year introduction to the Mohawk language known as Kanien’kéha.

The course offered at Renison University College is meant for students of any discipline who have little or no knowledge of the endangered language. This is just about everybody.

Instructor Nicole Bilodeau believes just one person at Six Nations of the Grand River near Brantford speaks the dialect fluently as a first language. She estimates there may be 20 on the territory who can speak it conversationally as a second language.

In the world it’s estimated there may be 3,500 Mohawk speakers.

Why teach a language that’s almost disappeared?

Preserving it helps to preserve Indigenous culture, the university says.

It responds to a call from the federal commission on Truth and Reconciliation for universities to create programs in Aboriginal languages. It maintains diversity, strengthening society like biological diversity strengthens nature.

“If we lose that language we’re losing an entire knowledge system,” Bilodeau said.

Bilodeau, 29, learned Mohawk as an adult while exploring her Six Nations identity. She grew up speaking English in London, Ont. At 12, she learned that her mother has an Indigenous background.

Later, while she was a graduate student, Bilodeau began learning the language. She’s now completed a two-year language immersion

program at Six Nations. “It has really changed my direction in life but also my world-view,” she said.

Mohawk is tricky to learn, similar to learning Arabic or Japanese, Bilodeau says. It’s based on verbs not nouns. “Everything is action-oriented,” she said.

Mohawk words have multiple components. This typically makes them longer than English words. The language uses 12 letters, apostrophes that count as a letter, and colons and accents.

Unlike English, limited to seven personal pronouns, Mohawk has over 60 pronouns, reflecting the importance of relationships among Indigenous people.

“One of the really beautiful pieces is that it’s very descriptive when it comes to relationships,” Bilodeau said. “It’s something that you don’t really fully understand until you become a speaker of the language.”

The Mohawk course, with a dozen students already signed up, may expand to a second semester. Ideally, UW would like to add another Indigenous language by 2019 with more to follow.

There are many to choose from. At least 22 native languages are known to Ontarians. Ojibwa, Cree, Oji-Cree and Mohawk account for 90 per cent or more of Indigenous speakers, census findings reveal.

Even with this range, native languages are spoken by only one in 546 Ontarians. Renison argues the Mohawk language did not wither naturally but was strangled by government policies meant to colonize Indigenous peoples.

Promoting it is now deemed the right thing to do. “It was subject to a really intentional campaign of destruction,” said Kofi Campbell, Renison’s academic dean.