Re-establishing Inter-generational Transmission in Kanien’kéha through “Authentic” L2 Speakers: A Case Study on Idiomatic Expressions (original) (raw)

2022, Generals Paper, University of Toronto

; although most of these have been fairly well documented, and reclamation attempts based on archival materials have started for some (see for instance Lukaniec's work on Wendat). Within this Northern branch, only Kanien'kéha fares slightly better, as it still retains a substantial number of speakers in certain communities. Kanien'kéha is spoken by the Kanien'kehá:ka people, originally the easternmost nation of the Rotinonhsión:ni (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, whose traditional territory stretched along the Mohawk River valley in present-day New York State. Due to repeated settler encroachments, the establishment of Jesuit missions, military raids, and forced relocations, especially following the defeat of their British allies in the American Revolutionary War in 1783, most Kanien'kehá:ka left their homeland to settle in Canada (Bonvillain 1992). Kanien'kéha is now spoken in six main communities: Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River), Tyendinaga, and Wáhta in Ontario; Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatà:ke in Quebec (members of these communities also own the small uninhabited hunting and fishing territory of Tioweró:ton); and Akwesáhsne, which straddles the border between these two Canadian provinces and New York State (Mithun 1999:424). From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, small groups from these communities have also (re)settled in the territories of Kanièn:ke and Kana'tsoharè:ke, located in the ancestral Kanien'kehá:ka homeland in upstate New York. With fewer than 700 speakers left, however, Kanien'kéha is obviously endangered as well, and is generally considered "Stage 8" on Fishman's (1991) original Graded Inter-generational Disruption Scale (GIDS); "Moribund" as per Lewis and Simons' (2010) Expanded GIDS (EGIDS); or "Severely Endangered" according to the UNESCO Major Evaluative Factors of Language Vitality and Endangerment (DeCaire 2021): the majority of active speakers of the language belong to the grandparent generation, or are even older. It is important, though, to note that traditional vitality metrics such as GIDS and EGIDS are flawed in a non-trivial way: they only measure the level of attrition of a language, and not its level of revitalization. In the case of Kanien'kéha, for instance, they do not take into account the growing number of highly proficient L2 speakers. On top of systemic socioeconomic pressures to shift to English and / or French, the endangerment of Kanien'kéha was greatly accelerated throughout the 20 th century by the governmentfunded and church-run system of residential and day schools in Canada, and boarding schools in the United States (Bilash 2011), whose explicit objective was the complete assimilation of Indigenous children into mainstream Western society in order to "get rid of the Indian problem" (Duncan Campbell Scott, cited in McDougall 2008). The objective was the destruction of Indigenous languages and cultures, by systematically punishing children for speaking their language (Grant 1996), and, more importantly, by breaking "the link between parent and child, preventing the natural transmission of language and culture to the next generation" (i.e. severing inter-generational transmission) (Bilash 2011:137). The current grandparent generation (i.e. individuals who grew up from the 1920s to the 1940s) were thus the last peer group to be at first largely monolingual in Kanien'kéha (or at least to use it as their primary language). After years in government schools, this generation either lost the language, or understandably did not wish their children to experience the same trauma, and was therefore unable to transmit it, so that the current parent generation generally does not speak the language natively, although the number of L2 speakers is now increasing thanks to revitalization efforts. As their own children now have more opportunities than they did to learn the language (e.g. school language classes or child immersion programs), this parent generation has come to be known as the "lost generation", isolated between the grandparent generation and child generation who speak it, or at least are learning it (Hoover and KORLCC 1992:271).