 This is Veldenkobern, filling in for Vanitha Srivastava. This is Don't Call Me Resilient. You construct meaning in and through the language and the terms, the phrases, the stories connect with one another in some interesting ways, and truth somehow emerges from these complex exchanges. Language, if we are not thinking about it, can be just a way to get from place A to B, a way to order lunch, or a way to pass an exam. But language is much more than a way to communicate with words. This is especially true if you have had your language forcibly removed from you, like the thousands of indigenous children who survived the colonial assimilation project. Languages hold within them philosophies and worldviews, culture, and identity. Language also has a lot to do with our relationships, how we relate to other people, to our families, to our ancestors, and to the natural environment. These are precisely the aspects of indigenous life that the Indian residential school system was designed to destroy. Last year, the United Nations acknowledged the importance of language by declaring the decade ahead to be the international decade of indigenous languages. But long before the United Nations declaration, First Nations Inuit and Métis peoples have been pushing to revitalize more than 70 indigenous languages across Turtle Island. And in 2019, the Indigenous Languages Act was passed by the Government of Canada. Still, progress and redress have been slow to come. As we look ahead to National Indigenous Peoples Day next week, today we are tackling the issue of disappearing indigenous languages, how much more needs to be done to revitalize them, and why doing so is critical. I'd like us to discuss all this as Professor Frank Deere. He is the Canada Research Chair and Associate Dean of Indigenous Education at the University of Manitoba. Thank you so much for joining us today, Frank. Welcome. Hello. Glad to be here. Frank, you've been a leading academic voice advocating for Indigenous language revitalization efforts, but before you embarked on your academic journey, you were a classroom teacher in Manitoba. How did your experiences teaching K-12 inform your current work around language education? Yeah, thanks for your question, and thanks for the invitation to speak with you. I graduated from my undergraduate teacher ed degree some time ago, and my first job as a professional teacher was in Manitoba's North. It was in Opa Panapewan, South Indian Lake. It's a Cree community. At the time, it was a combination of fly-in and ferry service, so kind of remote and a very lovely community of Cree people who really did care about the education of their children and the growth and sustainability of their community. I came to that job as a 24-year-old teacher with the skills that I acquired in my teacher ed degree, which had a great deal to do with supporting learning in the classroom. That was a grade one teacher. There was also a communal dimension to that experience that was really quite important and informed my views on education because you had in this community a great deal of concern about the cultural ethos of the community and the school, and there were a number of people in the community for whom the Cree language was spoken at home and in the community broadly, but the two main languages are English and French, and that's informing not just language use for these generations, but also in cultural dimensions as well. So a part of that is the media that they consume, the things that they wish to have in their lives. The cultural dimension of being Cree in that community ought to have a language focus. I come from a community in Quebec called Ganawaghe, and I was a part of a language immersion program growing up where the Ganaghehaga language was used, Ganagheha, and a part of that experience was the communal interface with language education and the way through which community members had an organic part of using and even in a sense defending the language in some ways, and Ganawaghe is just south of Montreal. So for some time now, the Quebec government has taken steps to ensure that French language use is protected by law. Not every indigenous community is at a place where the community interface with language preservation and use is at the same level, and many in some communities are far more preoccupied with some very important things, food sustainability, employment, but there is a developing concern about language and culture in these communities. I've toured a couple of decades to the current place where we are now prepared in many ways to be responsive to the language concerns in many communities. That has an educational dimension to it, its use in schools, but does have communal dimension as well. The invitation to elders and knowledge keepers who have their language or at some place to reacquiring their language is become an important part of communal life nowadays. So much so that many school divisions are becoming more and more interested in and willing to devote resources to supporting language programming. So we're at an exciting point of Heritage Canada report suggested that there were only three viable, was the word they used, languages that may survive the next few generations. Anishinaabe Moan, Ojibwe, and Cree, but there are many languages that have been or are about to get to a place where they may be viable and may inform the cultural ethos. So it's really exciting at this current time to see this growth. It's interesting you say a lot of this, Frank, because just recently the 1931 census was released and I went through my own home community, the Algonquins of Pikwaknagon, to revisit my own family. And I noticed that the language spoken by even my grandfather was listed as Indian. We're Anishinaabe Moan, one of the three viable, as the government says, the other one being Anuktatuk. And to see that, but also in Pikwaknagon, we might be down to single digits of fluent speakers. And to see that, as you said, what is the technology? Because in that census, it says, does the household have a radio, for example? And this is 1931, 90, 92 years ago. And I see over two generations, the language completely lost because, well, I know token words, I cannot be fluent in any kind of way. So it is all that language place and culture that go hand in hand, because it's one thing, as your academics has spoken about, that things will get lost in translations, just a mechanical translation from one word to another, as some of your publications have said, it doesn't carry that meaning in culture. Growing up in Ganawagi, working in Winnipeg, how did your home influence your decision to both research and advocate for Indigenous language education and revitalization? You're asking about my home, and I can't help but extend that beyond the home, if you will. My parents were part of the day school experience, didn't have their language as fully as I think they would have liked, which is, I have to believe why they enrolled me in an immersion program when they learned that our community was going into this direction, where the language was so important that we were actually chastised for speaking English. And when detention was still a thing, we would have to stay after school and write something in Kanigeha over and over and over again. That was just the way teachers operated at the time. But it was a place where we knew we could confront the notion that there are maybe not as many fluent speakers as we would like, and to include them within the educational ethos and the communal ethos in order to make sure that languages were a part of growth in the community. Ganoaga is one of a number of communities. If I may speak about my experiences, because you were asking about home, is one for which the Catholic Church is an important part of the community experience. One of my teachers from grade one and two was a member of the church as a nun. When you have this long-standing religious dimension to the community that's very strong, that becomes a part of the meaning that is resident language. A few years ago, I was asked by a colleague who's not Indigenous, and he was doing some Ukrainian language work in whatever class he was doing, and he said, I want to do a comparative thing, Frank. Can you give me the days and week and a months of the year in your language? And I was a junior professor at the time. I just, of course, obliged and put the English words in one for the days and week in one column and the words in Mohawk in the next column. And I had my thumbs up thinking I did something really good here. But to your point earlier, it took a moment to realize that those words don't really mean what we think we mean. And it's incredibly reductionist to say that we can translate in this way. And that's the issue with translation in some ways. Some of the really good developments in app technology for language learning. And they can be quite useful, but, you know, for the ones that I've seen, I'm by no means an educational technology expert, but they privilege the dominant language. So you might ask yourself, today's Monday, so what does Monday mean in your language? Well, you might enter the word Monday and you'd get, in my language, it would be something like, and you could say that this means that, but it really doesn't mean that. In my language, the word from Monday that I just shared with you is said to mean after the holy day. The word in my language for Friday is rūā yātāna taktuntē, which means day of the crucifixion. Now, some have moved away from that and they have another set of words for the days of the week. For instance, I just related Friday, you could say wiskādim, which means the fifth day, but you could see that there's meaning resident in the language. And it's really important to reflect on what that means. Some of the conversations about Indigenous sovereignty and the activist movement generally revolve around the fence of something, defending our waters, defending our women and girls, defending all the sorts of things. And the rhetoric associated with that can be really interesting to me. And the symbols, the word for warrior is sometimes understood as rādiskāna gette in my language. The term rādiskāna gette can be understood to mean the bearer of the burdens of peace. And those stories can go on for hours, days, and they're really quite important. We have to go through life using language to communicate things and sometimes we need to do them in an incisive way. Of course we do. But I think what people are hoping to do with language and cultural revitalization is to ensure that those stories are still there and that we're aware that they're there. I think it's really exciting to be part of some sort of general contribution to the movement on sustaining Indigenous languages. What's resident in your identity and the language is so important because that's how we draw meaning, you construct meaning in and through the language and the terms, the phrases, the stories connect with one another in some interesting ways. And truth somehow emerges from these complex exchanges. And one might say when they're interfacing with people they love and care about, possibly members of their own kinship groups and communities that truth emerges through these exchanges. I think a lot of Indigenous people might relate to this and it will register with us is that we are witnessing in some places like my own community for example, not broadly, so Anishinaabemowin, but to see sort of language death. There are some places where Statistics Canada reported, especially on the West Coast, there was 30% rise of some individuals taking up their Indigenous languages as a second language. So the revitalization, it is tenuous in some places. There's been very concerted effort because I know a lot of Indigenous communities that look with a little bit of envy towards your own Ganawage, there was the politics of the 1990s. As you mentioned, defense was woven through it, so defense of culture, community, Indigenous sovereignty, statement of their peoplehood, and the revitalization of that. So living vicariously through that, but seeing that some are viable, some are not your own community, having been immersed in Cree where it is sort of viable. It's a long project to generations that we've lost it in Pekwaknagon to rebuild it and revitalize it. It's a bit of a mountain for some. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Well, Bonakwit Kanu might be known to some of your listeners. He's the current NDP lead before he got into politics. He was working in media. He said something really quite interesting once and this is back to the communal dimensions of language sustainability. Many of us find ourselves waiting for something to happen. Not everybody. Some people are doing some lovely work initiating these changes among some number of their fellow community members. And that needs to continue because if you wait, he said for the government to try to save your language, they're going to die. Right? This needs to be something that we all take on board and work hard within our own communities and others for which there is some similarity in language or initiative or collaboration. Right? That's really quite important. But that's not a five minute job. You mentioned the 1990s. Before I came to the University of Manitoba, I was working in a place called the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Center. They support First Nations schools in Manitoba. And of course, language and culture is a part of those issues. And we had a retreat one day where we're trying to come to terms with what sort of changes we can help with in regard to language education. Then the conversation descends into an institutional one rather than the one I think we hope to have because we began talking about the importance of assessment. We should be assessing our students and we need to be mindful of the manner which we're doing it, how we're doing it, how this leads to graduation and the introduction to post-secondary education. All of those things are very important. But I'll remember going to this particular event, an elder was present, one of a number, puts her hand up and said something like this, that this discussion on assessment is all really interesting. However, we're not going to know if we're successful with this until these students are speaking their own children in the language. That's the marker of success. All that important work that was decades ago where I come from, clearly some of my fellow classmates from the very cohort of which I was a part are speaking to others and their children in the language. They're recording videos, they're writing in it, they're some who are maybe a bit younger than me but went through that same immersion process and you can find them on places like APT and talking in the language. That's success. That's something that is a departure from the governmental approach to change. If you're an MLA or an MP and you've got a concern, you've got to have a year and a half at the most turnaround time for that to have any attention. And for better or for worse, sometimes for worse, it's not going to get any attention if the government can't somehow claim something from it. I don't indict all politicians and all political systems with that. I get the sense that there are these high level concerns on the part of government to be helping with this sort of thing, which is fantastic. I've done some work with governmental departments, libraries and archives, Canada. Last week I was on Parliament Hill with Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the House of Commons, talking about these issues on language, reclamation and sustainability. So the interest is developing and that's really quite important but it's one of patience. It means that I have to commit to sitting with my son and speaking with him in the language, to committing to maybe being a bit obstinate about the language I use in certain contexts to ensure that at the very least the issue is resident within the public consciousness and that's a part of change. It's very important. So long before the Indigenous Languages Act was passed in 2019 and it's very interesting to hear you go a little bit back and forth between going to the upper echelons of the government and bureaucracies, speaking with deputy ministers, even ministers, other politicians who might be sitting and you understand, well, what's on the political agenda of the day? So I get the sense that you haven't given up on governments. There might be something that it can do. Myself, I'm a little bit more skeptical of it given the enactment of the Indigenous Languages Act in 2019 and resources put behind it. What do you see in the classrooms or what can be done at K-12 and then perhaps what does it mean for university settings at the undergraduate and graduate level? Let me just agree broadly with the idea that that government works in interesting ways that are not necessarily going to have the end results that we hope for, that your skepticism, I frankly share it, but the government will over time, I hope, we can all hope, be responsive to these developing concerns. Let's be fair and maybe this is where my hope for government response is resident. Over time, we found ourselves talking about issues and experiences that weren't discussed in the past. There are people, colleagues, elders who have fought a lot of hard fights, so I don't have to fight them in the same way and we're in a better place because of it. And if that means that money is moved in a certain way or transferred so that communities can be supported in that journey, that's great. That's important. But I think you and I are on the same page about the manner through which things are prioritized in government. The school issue is really quite interesting because we have had a number of provincial governments here in Manitoba that have taken up the concerns to some extent. The current government, not so much, right? There's change maybe on the horizon. We'll see if that plays out. But what that's done is to raise the awareness amongst the teaching profession, amongst the schools, and amongst communities to an extent, not completely, about the importance of indigenous perspectives in what's going on in the classroom. Language is a part of that. I've been doing what I can to inform that conversation others have as well. There's a difficult issue, however, because many school districts, many schools, many universities are struggling with the market availability of qualified, fluent people who can work in the schools and universities to help. As much as the public school struggles, the universities might be even in a worse place because for the most part, it seems that universities are interested in recruiting instructors to be teaching the course here or there. There seems to be very few fluent indigenous language speakers at many of the universities because it's not as rewarding a profession. Their contributions are more valued in the public school system where they could get a full-time teaching job. They'll get paid. So that HR issue is really quite difficult. It's leading to some school districts to be doing some interesting things to try to support this, where you have someone who's not as fluent in the language, but the school district, if they can have some sort of understanding of commitment over time with this particular teacher to work on their development of the language even further so they can serve in that school or school district. There are some schools that are doing quite well in Manitoba. Mystery Lake School District is in the north. That's Thompson for your listeners. So about eight hours north, the Korean language is strong in many parts of the north and some schools in that school district doing quite well. But as this develops, as the opportunities become more numerous, then we're going to have these issues. So it's really important for communities to be working with their own people in order to ensure that the language is as strong as it can be and that people are encouraged to take up roles in the community. The responsibilities of a place where I work, I work in a faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. We're not where we should be with teacher education, with a focus on language. We're working on it. Yeah, our people when you're on the ground in our communities, they haven't really given up now, have they? No, no, they haven't. You can imagine a number of different contexts. I live and work in Winnipeg. I work in the north. I sometimes have the pleasure of supervising, practicum teaching in the schools, and also conduct research sometimes in the northern community. So I get to see what goes on in those different communities and the cosmopolitan nature of an urban environment like Winnipeg means the needs and desires of the indigenous peoples are divergent. You have limited resources to support those and someone has to make decisions. About where those resources go. So it's a classic political situation where you have limited resources, divergent needs and authority to act. I think the struggle for some is being mindful of the communities in which you work. The sorts of decisions you make on programming are going to affect students. There's going to be some for whom, well in the context of Winnipeg, Anishinaabe Mohan is going to be the language of study and use in some schools, whilst Cree, Dakota, OG Cree is not as prevalent in those school districts. So it's really tough to see some who are in a situation to learn and they want to learn, but they may not be in the communal school context in which they can best do that. In the north, of course, it's a bit different where you have not completely uniform, but more or less a uniform language context there. So I'll pick up on Mystery Lake again, but frontier broadly in the north. The Cree language is what really reflects the communal dimensions of those schools. So the goal is more understandable in that sense. So it's really tough and I'm afraid that for the next little while it's going to be difficult to be ministering to the needs of all school districts and schools in regard to language programming, but this is not a five minute job. This is going to take a long time. There's more battles to come. There's more respect to be had and some people are better off than others. I know those language law that came into effect in Quebec recently is occurring at the expense of participation by some in their respective language, right? And what happens in the Commons is really quite important. I can only imagine how difficult that might be, but what we can do and what we have done, if I may say we have continued to work hard in our respective communal and professional contexts as best as we can to do what's best. Well, with that, I'll say one of the only indigenous words I know from my language, which is Megwetch, which is thanks. And I know this will be an exciting podcast for many to listen to. You gave us something very tangible to understand that there's discouragement in our communities, especially being Algonquin and 70% of my nations on the Quebec side as well. And we take a deep breath as we move forward and say, well, it's just another barrier too. So as you move between, you know, come down from the ivory towers and walk on the ground down in our communities, Megwetch for all that and for sharing this and pulling back the curtains for those who are saying these languages don't have to die and not on your watch. So Megwetch Frank for sharing everything. Thank you. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. It was an incredible privilege to share this time with Professor Deere to hear a firsthand expert account of the challenges and triumphs faced by indigenous peoples as they revitalize this fundamental aspect of our existence. And if you want to read more about some of the issues we talked about today, some of the readings that Professor Deere mentioned, as well as other resources, they can be found in our show notes on theconversation.com. You can connect with us on Instagram at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast and make sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss an episode. Please consider sharing this pod with a friend or family member or drop a review on whatever podcast app you use. Finally, if there are news stories that you would love us to cover, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at dcmr at theconversation.com. Thank you for listening and thanks to everyone at Don't Call Me Resilient. It's been a great pleasure filling in for my friend Vanita. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This episode was hosted by Veldin Coburn and produced by me, Vanita Srivastava, and associate producer Bokeh Seisi. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Morose. The audio editor for this episode was Krish Dinesh Kumar. Our regular audio editor, Remitula Sheikh, is on holiday. Ataka Kaki is our marketing and visual innovation consultant. Journalism student Kikachi Meme is our assistant producer, and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.