Time now to act on language revitalization

John Elliott’s father used to say “It’s almost too late, but it’s not quite too late. There is still time, if we hurry, if we rush and get the work done.”

That was 36 years ago, and John’s father Dave is now gone, as are many of the other elders John worked with in his efforts to protect and perpetuate the First Nations language in his community.

John is a teacher. He has been for 37 years.

“Working in the area of the Saanich language revitalization has been quite a job,” he told a gathering on April 30. The occasion was the release of a report on the status of BC First Nations languages. If it was almost too late 36 years ago to sustain the First Nations’ language in the community, it’s at a crisis point now.

There are only three of 18 fluent speakers left, John said.

The event was held at the LAU,WELNEW Tribal School Cultural Building. John said the name comes from an event from long ago, when the people of Saanich survived a flood. It’s a sacred name that means place of escape, place of refuge, place of healing.

It’s an appropriate place to hold a discussion about the protection of First Nations languages against a tsunami wave that’s swept them to the brink of extinction.

John brought his school students into the gathering to sing a prayer song for the languages in B.C., all of which fall into three worrisome categories of endangerment: Severely endangered, nearly extinct and sleeping.
This last category means there are no living speakers left. Three languages of the 32 in the province fall into this last category. Twenty-two are nearly extinct, no longer being learned by adults or children and only spoken by a few elderly people.

British Columbia is home to 60 per cent of the Indigenous languages in Canada, and across the province there is only 5.1 per cent of the entire Indigenous population fluent in all of them. That’s down 95 per cent in 120 years. A shocking statistic by anyone’s yardstick.

“That’s scary data,” said Cliff Atleo, Sr., president of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, and one of only 115 fluent speakers left of the Nuu-chah-nulth language.
Gitsnimx tops the charts with 1,219 fluent speakers and is teetering between endangered and severely endangered. At the bottom is Nicola, Pentl’ac, and Wetalh, with zero fluent speakers. These languages will never be heard spoken fluently again.

Hannah Amrhein, a researcher who worked on the language report, said colonization, historic English-only policies, the residential school system, which caused a huge interruption in the transmission of First Nations languages as a mother tongue, are in part to blame for the dramatic decrease in First Nations language use.
But there are also reasons why revitalization efforts struggle along.

“First Nations languages are largely excluded from government, higher education, business, media,” said Amrhein. “There is also a lack of resources and funding for language revitalization efforts.”

She said language “is our very way of life. Without it we have no tradition, no culture. It means everything to us.”
When language is lost, is means more than there are just no more speakers of the language.

“Thousands of years of accumulated cultural nuances, rituals, practices, philosophies, ideas, belief, intricate details about a way of life are lost when a language is lost…Through language people are connected to their history, ancestors, land, where they come from, who their relations are and connection between the generations are lost when a language is lost.

“Health is put at risk. Healthy, productive, strong communities and individuals are closely correlated with knowledge of one’s language and culture…Cultural, historic scientific, ecological, biological knowledge. Each language contains an immense about of knowledge and that’s lost when a language is lost, and not only from First Nations communities, but the sum of all human knowledge,” Amrhein explained.
The time to act is now, she insisted.

“We have such a limited number of years left because so many of our fluent speakers are elders.” The vast majority that make up that 5.1 per cent fluency rate are people over the age of 65.

“The other really shocking part of this is that under the age of 24 only 1.5 per cent of the population is fluent speakers, so this is the exact opposite of what we would like to see for our languages to be thriving.”
Language is the heart and soul of a nation, said John Elliott.

“You can’t have a nation without the language…All our laws, our family laws, our teachings and our beliefs are in that language and that’s what holds our nations together,” he said.

He and his siblings work to build their own fluency with their 90-year-old mother in the master-apprentice program offered through the First People’s Heritage, Language and Culture Council.
His mother spent from the time she was four years old until 11 years old in the boarding school.

“She was told never, ever teach your children the language. Never ever pass that along. .. That’s the story of our past. That’s B.C.’s history. That’s Canada’s history. We can’t ignore it.”

Elliott is working to turn the grim statistics on language around. He’s created immersion programs within the school because of his experience with his mother and other elders.

“It helps your abilities and confidence,” he said of being immersed in the language daily. “You can hear better, you can speak words better.”

The adults in the community are offered language programs, because there’s no sense in teaching the children if they have no one to speak the language to when they get home.

His community is creating a core of dedicated teachers of the language and soon will be offering a degree program in language revitalization in partnership with the University of Victoria and the Saanich Indian School Board.

John Elliott is considered a language champion and he encourages all communities to champion language as well.

“We have to build capacity in our communities immediately. Not sometime later, because there is no later for us. It has to be done now.”