B.C. should give its 34 Indigenous languages official status, advocates say

An Indigenouslanguage renaissance is happeninginCanada, according to those pushing to preserve and revive the original lexicons of First Nations.

From Jeremy Dutcher'sPolaris Prize-winning debut album,Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, sung entirely in Wolostoq, to Edge of the Knife, a feature filmspoken in two Haida dialects, Indigenous languages are receiving an increasing amount ofexposure.

But advocates in B.C. say there's much more workto be done to invigorate these endangered languages.

"My grandmother only spoke Tsilhqot'inand my mother was bilingual and it was my generation where that began to shift," said Helen Haig-Brown,co-director of Edge of the Knife.

"Even in my territory[where there are many speakers], anyone younger than me, the majority don't speak the language. That was a pretty big dawning for me," she said.

All 34 languages in B.C. endangered

There are currently 34 Indigenous languages in B.C. and all of them are critically endangered.

The First Peoples' Cultural Council thinksit would helpto have all of them recognized as official languages.

"It is a very usefulstrategy to raise the profileand create awareness of the original languages of these lands," said Aliana Parker, the language programs manager at FPCC.

Parker says that doesn't mean government officials would have to learn orspeak the languages, nor that they would need to be printed on the back of a cereal box, for example.

Rather, she says, the recognition would promote legislation for funding and policy supports for Indigenous languages. It could also mean more opportunities for inserting optional Indigenous language programs in schools.

Purely symbolic?

It's a big ask tomake so many languages official but not impossible.

In 2014, Alaska's state legislature approved a bill making 20 Native languages on a par with English.

The Northwest Territories recognizes 11 languages, nineof them Indigenous.

IndigenousHawaiian was recognized as the official state language of Hawaii in 1978.

But some saymaking a language officialis mainly symbolic.

"Just becausea language becomes official, thatdoesn'tmean that everyone is speaking the Hawaiianlanguage," saidCandaceKaleimamoowahinekapuGalla, anassistant professor in the department of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia.

She saida number ofefforts in Hawaii (which manyHawaiians spell as"Hawaii"), includingpreschool "language nests," immersionand university programs, helped revitalize the language.

In language nests, children are exposed to an Indigenous language extensively. In 1984, Hawaii began using theprogram, which has helpedincreasethe number of speakers dramatically.

In 1983, the number of speakers of Hawaiian was estimated at 1,500. According to the state of Hawaii, in 2016, 18,400 people above age five spoke Hawaiian at home.

Painful damage to undo

There arecurrentlyno official languages in British Columbia.

Minister of Indigenous Relations and ReconciliationScott Fraser said his government is not havingany discussions about adding Indigenous ones.

But hepointed to the $50 million the B.C. government committed to Indigenous languages over the next threeyears.

Itis thelargestcommitment to Indigenous languages a provincialor federal government has ever made in Canada.

For Fraser, language revitalization means healthy communities.

"The whole mandate of the residential school system was to strip away culture, the very identity of thekids going there," Fraser said.

"We recognize thatwas wrong on everyleveland itcaused a lot of lasting damage to communities, and weunderstand that healthy communitiesare part of a healthy province and that'swhat we are working toward," he added.

The FPCCsays the $50 million investment is a good start but notenough to sustain language revitalizationneeded in theprovince.

For Haig-Brown, even seemingly simple solutions aren't so easy.

"I would press anyone who is a speaker to just always speak," she said.

"With that said, I know that [carries] some internal battles because we are having to undo pretty painful damage around enforcing people to not speak their languages, through punishment, shaming and violence. So, when learning language, we are also having to undo that."

Read more from CBCBritish Columbia