Task force taking community's recommendations

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Members of the Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures recently held a focus group in Calgary to hear recommendations on how to structure a new Aboriginal Languages and Culture Centre (ALCC), a not-for-profit organization that will promote and preserve Aboriginal languages and culture.

The task force has been holding focus groups across Canada and will take the recommendations to the Minister of Canadian Heritage in September. The recommendations will dictate how the ALCC will operate and distribute its budget of $172 million.

"In Calgary we tried to invite as many people who work in the field of languages and cultures as possible. It's an Aboriginal consultation process," said Mary Jane Jim, a member of the task force. "What we're finding out in the meetings is that across the country there's a very large concern, a huge concern, with respect to the fluency and revitalization and there's a sense of urgency that the languages are dying."

Some of the main concerns people have is that the funding may not be enough and it wouldn't be available fast enough. Also people are worried the bureaucracy that's created to distribute the money is too cumbersome.

"We certainly learned that in Calgary, with respect to the language group there, and that although there are institutions like the universities and schools, we're still not creating fluency. So we need to focus on fluency," said Jim. "The recommendation that's coming out quite regularly is immersion."

Marie Battiste is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and a United Nations technical expert on guidelines for protecting Indigenous knowledge and heritage. Battiste works with the task force as a member of the Circle of Experts, which acts as a resource group for the task group.

Battiste said that Canada hasn't been doing a great job in helping to keep Aboriginal culture alive compared to countries like the United States and New Zealand, but she said that Canada will rapidly catch up if the funding remains and grows.

"The loss of language is not simply a change of communication forms, it really affects their livelihood and their notions of place and how they live within place. The Indigenous languages are ecological, they provide information that provides people with awareness with how to live in place, how to live sustainably in place, how to manage their environments and their lands, how to connect to the ancient stories and traditions of their people. That is a tremendous psychological loss to people," said Battiste. "It's almost like being made into refugees because they lose their whole connections to their place, to their people, to their culture, to what was a stable and sustainable environment."

Battiste said the task force is doing a good job and is being set up so it can reach out to communities throughout Canada, but time is really the task force's greatest enemy.

"That's the issue, is not to let an entity's structural problems create the backlog of administrative sludge that will prevent the money from getting into the hands as quickly as possible so they can begin to do, and continue to do, the work they are doing in those communities," said Battiste. "It's really important that the entity be established without any delay, but part of it is that the government requires so much detailing of the entity that it just gets caught up in a bureaucratic maze of having to do certain kinds of things and that's where you need to have internal specialists to help you to get through that."