Canada's big chill: Indigenous languages in Education (original) (raw)
Related papers
Consequences and Remedies of Indigenous Language Loss in Canada
Societies, 2021
Many Indigenous languages in Canada are facing the threat of extinction. While some languages remain in good health, others have already been lost completely. Immediate action must be taken to prevent further language loss. Throughout Canada’s unacceptable history of expunging First Nations’ ways of life, systemic methods such as residential schools attempted to eradicate Indigenous cultures and languages. These efforts were not entirely successful but Indigenous language and culture suffered greatly. For Indigenous communities, language loss impaired intergenerational knowledge transfer and compromised their personal identity. Additionally, the cumulative effects of assimilation have contributed to poor mental and physical health outcomes amongst Indigenous people. However, language reclamation has been found to improve well-being and sense of community. To this objective, this paper explores the historical context of this dilemma, the lasting effects of assimilation, and how this ...
Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education, 2017
In 2007, the Ontario Ministry of Education released the Ontario First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Education Policy Framework. The policy set forth a vision to significantly improve the levels of achievement for Indigenous students attending Ontario's public schools, and to increase awareness and knowledge of Indigenous cultures and perspectives for all students by the year 2016. Drawing upon critical pedagogy, theories of decolonizing education, and policy enactment, we engaged with the Framework and a set of related documents to a critical discourse analysis. Four discourses were revealed: achievement; increasing capacities; incorporating "cultures, histories, and perspectives"; and absence. In tracing the presence of these discourses across the documents we found that, while well-intentioned, the policy has yielded problematic outcomes. In turn, this undermines the ability of Ontario's education system to not only reach the aforementioned goals but also to take an active role in reconciliation and efforts towards the decolonization of education.
Policy Debates and Indigenous Education: The Trialectic of Language, Culture, and Identity
Indigenous Education: Language, Culture, and Identity, 2015
In this chapter, we explore several policy debate topics associated with indigenous education with a focus on the issues of indigenous languages, cultures, and identity. Highly political by nature, the terms indigeneity and indigenous rights are central to most policy debates with direct implications on social justice issues, human rights, and education in general. Besides examining global indigenous declarations that directly influence indigenous education, we also examine policy debate issues within five country contexts—in China, Mexico, Taiwan, Uganda, and the United States. We use the term indigenous genocide to account for any former, current, or future government policy that intentionally causes the assimilation of indigenous peoples into the dominant national culture. Examples are given in the five case countries of how indigenous genocide can lead to the genocide of indigenous peoples’ languages, cultures, and/or identities. The chapter concludes by highlighting the central role indigenous education can play in being able to curb or reverse indigenous genocidal policies. Crucial to reversing anti-indigenous policies is the involvement and empowerment of indigenous peoples in every facet of the policy planning and implementation processes.
Indigenous Language Revitalization: How Education Can Help Reclaim “Sleeping” Languages
Journal of Language, Identity, and Education , 2021
, The New York Times (NYT) reported the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada (Austen, 2021). News of this mass murder and its subsequent cover up rocked the world and came at a time when Canada and many other countries have mounted reconciliation efforts as they attempt to come to terms with a brutal past involving Indigenous populations. The residential school context described in the NYT story is representative of residential school educational arrangements in the last century that saw children from numerous First Nations forcibly removed from their homes and forbidden to speak their languages for generations (McIvor, 2020). By detaching these children from language, culture, and place, state-and church-sponsored schooling sought to train Indigenous students for subservience. Sadly, these cruel efforts inflicted unimaginable harm-both epistemological and emotionalupon these children (McCarty et al., this issue). In fact, Geraldine Bob, a former student, featured in the NYT story disclosed that the school staff members "would just start beating you and lose control and hurl you against the wall, throw you on the floor, kick you, punch you" (Austen, 2021). Such abuse, as we learn, was not uncommon. In starting my commentary with this disturbing anecdote, my goal is to highlight how Indigenous people have been forcibly removed from their land, displaced, and subsequently had their rights revoked and identities rejected (McKinley & Smith, 2019). That their lives are inextricably intertwined with the land is further underscored by Chiblow and Meighan (2021, in press). More importantly, however, as the four papers in this special issue demonstrate, vestiges of coloniality-often mediated through language-in-education policies and practices-have had a lasting impact on disenfranchised Indigenous people. And ultimately what's at stake is a politics of identity (mis)recognition. Before I proceed any further, I would like to acknowledge that to some extent I am complicit in the settler colonialism that I write about. I want to acknowledge the land upon which my university, Michigan State University (MSU) resides. MSU occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg, namely, the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. But I am also originally from Singapore, a small country in Southeast Asia that was previously inhabited by the Indigenous people (i.e., the bumiputeras, or "Sons of the Soil") of the region. Over the centuries, however, this region was overrun by colonizers from Portugal (the 15 th century), the Netherlands (17 th century) and Britain (19 th century), all of whom plundered the wealth of and in Southeast Asia. But I am also a product of colonialism, having grown up in a postcolonial Singapore whose government preserved many policy practices (e.g., the implementation of English as a medium of instruction in public schools) that it inherited from the British, and having been raised Catholic within a family of Portuguese heritage. I mention my own history in order to underscore how the apparatuses of church and school have historically and universally played pivotal roles in advancing the colonial enterprise; the lasting influence of church and school also echoes through the papers in this special issue.
In 2007, the Ontario Ministry of Education released the Ontario First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Education Policy Framework. The policy set forth a vision to significantly improve the levels of achievement for Indigenous students attending Ontario's public schools, and to increase awareness and knowledge of Indigenous cultures and perspectives for all students by the year 2016. Drawing upon critical pedagogy, theories of decolonizing education, and policy enactment, we engaged with the Framework and a set of related documents to a critical discourse analysis. Four discourses were revealed: achievement; increasing capacities; incorporating "cultures, histories, and perspectives"; and absence. In tracing the presence of these discourses across the documents we found that, while well-intentioned, the policy has yielded problematic outcomes. In turn, this undermines the ability of Ontario's education system to not only reach the aforementioned goals but also to take an a...
Language, Land, and Stewardship: Indigenous Imperatives and Canadian Policy
Language Politics and Policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States, 2019
The decline of Aboriginal languages across North America is part and parcel of the policy-driven erasure of Aboriginal presence in most parts of the continent. Current initiatives to recognize and support the languages generally ignore their embeddedness in pre-colonial, deeply rooted, living relationships with the land. Addressing this implies shifting from a rights paradigm to a stewardship paradigm. Such a move is implied by the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), which commits governments to “respect, preserve, and maintain” Aboriginal traditional knowledge, including languages. The developing tradition of indigenous planning offers guidance for how public governments and local communities can go about linking land tenure and use with intertwined environmental, political, social, economic and cultural goals, including language revitalization and maintenance. In the Canadian context this is still rare, despite isolated examples. More systemic policy support for linguistic stewardship could draw on the capabilities approach to social justice and social development.
FIRE: Forum for International Research in Education
Indigenous languages are struggling for breath in the Global North. In Canada, Indigenous language medium schools and early childhood programs remain independent and marginalized. Despite government commitments, there is little support for Indigenous language-in-education policy and initiatives. This article describes an inaugural, country-wide, federally-funded, Indigenous-led language revitalization research project, entitled NE?OL?EW? (one mind-one people). The project brings together nine Indigenous partners to build a country-wide network and momentum to pressure multi-levels of government to honour agreements enshrining the right of children to learn their Indigenous language. The project is documenting approaches to create new Indigenous language speakers, focusing on adult language learners able to keep the language vibrant and teach their language to children. The article reflects upon how this Northern emphasis on Indigenous language revitalization and country-wide network...