10: Indigenous North American Languages (Optional)

Video Script

A lot of our attention so far has focused on English, which is convenient because it’s a language that we all know, but we can learn a lot about mental grammar by looking at other languages. Canada has an incredibly rich and diverse history of languages that were spoken by Aboriginal peoples long before European settlers arrived. Linguists estimate that there were more than two hundred different Indigenous languages spoken in this region, and these languages were quite different from each other — they formed about 15 different language families.

At the time of the 2016 census in Canada, there were still about two hundred and thirteen thousand people speaking about 64 different Indigenous languages from 12 different language families. Some of these languages, like Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibwe, are quite healthy, with thousands of speakers. But many more Indigenous languages are critically endangered — they have only a few hundred or a few dozen speakers who are quite elderly. When those speakers die, the language could die with them.

Why have so many of the Aboriginal languages been lost? It’s tempting to attribute it to economic and cultural pressures — TV shows and books and music are all in English, and everyone wants to speak English to get a job — but it’s not as simple as that. From the time that European settlers first arrived in this region, they engaged in deliberate strategies to try to eliminate First Nations people and their culture and language. The settlers engaged in war with the Indigenous people and brought new germs that caused devastating epidemics. The Europeans took over fertile land to grow their own crops and forced Indigenous people to live in small, confined reserves that could not sustain the crops to feed their people.

And these strategies aren’t just from hundreds of years ago: between the 1960s and the late 1980s, the Canadian government seized thousands of Aboriginal children from their homes and placed them forcibly in foster homes and adoptive homes largely with white families, which meant that the children did not learn their parents’ language. This forced adoption is sometimes called the “sixties scoop”, and it continued the tradition of the residential schools.

The residential school system existed in Canada for more than 100 years, and the last residential school closed in 1996, not very long ago. Aboriginal children were taken from their families and forced to live in quite appalling conditions in schools that were run by the government and by the churches. The person who initiated the system was Sir John A Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. He was quite clear that the whole purpose of taking children from their families was to make sure that they grew up without knowledge of their history, language, and culture. Here’s his attitude about children who grow up in their families and communities:

“When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write.”

And here’s what his plan was:

“Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

He was completely open about his goals: he wanted Aboriginal children to stop thinking and speaking in the ways they learned in their families and communities, and to start thinking and speaking like white men.

In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, after years of consulting with survivors of residential schools. The executive summary begins this way:

“These residential schools were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture—the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society.”

The TRC’s Calls to Action acknowledge the crucial role that Indigenous languages will play in achieving reconciliation between Aboriginal people and the larger Canadian population. Here are just some of the Calls to Action.

• We call on the federal government to draft new Aboriginal education legislation including protecting the right to Aboriginal languages [and] the teaching of Aboriginal languages as credit courses.
• We call upon the federal government to enact an Aboriginal Languages Act that incorporates the following principles:
• Aboriginal languages are a fundamental and valued element of Canadian culture and society, and there is an urgency to preserve them.
• The federal government has a responsibility to provide sufficient funds for Aboriginal-language revitalization and preservation.
• The preservation, revitalization, and strengthening of Aboriginal languages and cultures are best managed by Aboriginal people and communities.
• Funding for Aboriginal language initiatives must reflect the diversity of Aboriginal languages.
• We call upon post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages.

So there is a need for language preservation, revitalization and teaching. What can linguists do to help with these efforts? Of course the most important thing is to work with Aboriginal communities, to listen to the community members and find out from them what they think would be most valuable.

Some linguists have helped to document Indigenous languages, recording and transcribing speech and stories from native speakers. This is especially crucial when the speakers are elderly and the language is critically endangered. Documenting a language also involves doing phonological, morphological and syntactic analysis to be able to write grammar books and dictionaries for the language. Some linguists have also helped to develop writing systems for languages that didn’t have any written form. If a language has been documented, then linguists can help to create educational resources and curriculum material that language teachers can use, and can help to train language teachers.

11.2 Preserving Mohawk

In this unit, Dr. Kanatawakhon-Maracle talks about how, for a language to survive, it must be widely spoken.

Video Script

I’ve been a language teacher for years, you know, and trying to teach and there’s always been this segment of people out there who “really support what you’re doing” and stuff like that and I’ve gotten into the habit of just ignoring them because their support is verbal; they’re not in my classes; they’re not learning the language. Real support for an Aboriginal language is getting out there and learning that language and learning to speak it, you know, so, to help bring that language back into its own. I don’t expect any community to work towards, you know, sole monolingualism — that’s that’s just not doesn’t make sense — however, bilingualism is a fairly normal way to be with a large percentage of the world’s population. And, and, for, you know, my grandparents, my grandfather was bilingual, you know, and my great-grandparents were bilingual and they could use English when they needed to and they used Mohawk when they needed to and, or by choice or whatever.

I speak Mohawk and English so the thing is I can also, you know, use both languages. I … the difference I guess is that I also read and write Mohawk as well. So I’m a speaker and I’m literate which is the sort of thing that we would want to teach students especially at the university level because there’s a lot of stuff written in Aboriginal languages that are presently not available in English or, you know or probably doesn’t necessarily have to be available in English if they’re speakers of the language.

People have always said you know, “Oh yeah, we know that the language should be in the home.” No! The language should be in the street! If the language is surviving — if the language is truly an important part of being — it’s in the street; it’s in the stores; it’s outside of the home. When you keep the language in the home it dies, because the speakers of the language eventually leave that home and then they go into the street where they’re speaking English all the time and they meet somebody else who is also speaking English and eventually … the next generation is being raised by two English-speaking people and of course then the language is, is gone.

[CA: Would you say that that attitude that says “oh the language is for at home,” is that, is that another legacy of colonialism where it was shameful to speak an Aboriginal language?]

Yeah well let’s keep it.

[CA: Yeah, it’s private, but not outside the house.]

Yeah and the real problem is that when when the language is only spoken in the home especially in contemporary society where people are, spending more and more time at home in front of some sort of technical device — in times past they were out going from home to home and all people were speaking the language and visiting and the language is very much alive — but once it becomes ensconced within the home and people get to the point where, sure they can talk to their parents, but they can’t really understand their neighbours.

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One of the things about language is — I understand Mohawk and I speak Mohawk because I’ve heard hundreds of people speaking it.

[CA: Right. So that’s how you learned it, was growing up in the community where it was spoken?]

Yeah I basically grew up with Mohawk and English and as I got to be a teenager I spent a lot more time with the older folks because they were more inclined to be speakers. Also, I find old people a lot more entertaining than younger adults, you know, they no longer have the sort of worries that, and the stress, that younger people have. And the stories, I mean, the really funny thing is that I find with older people, with the old folks, they’re not very trusting, you know you basically have to visit them a lot before you kind of crack that shell and you get access to, to what they what they know. And I suppose to a certain degree that’s self-serving but at the same time these people have got, they’ve got tradition to pass on; their responsibility is to be passing on this stuff and if they’ve decided that well nobody wants to hear that you know and so they stop telling it then it, it dies with them. So I found that spending a lot of time with the older folks you hear a lot of stories.

And the funny thing too about, one of the things that I found with the language is they were a lot more fun in Mohawk than they were in English. They get cranky and grumpy and unhappy when they speak English and I don’t know why because, it just, I had an uncle used to visit and, well, boy I mean this he had a complaint about everything he had a gripe about everything and stuff and it always seemed to be so grating in English but when he was speaking Mohawk we spent a lot more time laughing. Because that was the language of his childhood and that was how he grew up and he’s, you know, he would tell stories from that time where it’s often you know were, were a lot more amusing or a lot more interesting than what he was having to deal with presently in English.

I’ve had students that have come in that have taken a number of years in the immersion program at Six Nations. They seem to have a sense of the language but they’re not speakers. The course that I teach right now is a fairly heavy grammar-based course because I find that if I mean you can you can learn all the vocabulary you want, but if you have no sense of the grammar of the language, how are you going to utilize that vocabulary? What are you gonna do with it? And the thing is that the students that have come in that have some language, they know a lot of vocabulary… can’t do a thing with it! They know how to say expressions; they know dialogues; they know a whole lot of things that I find is, okay, great, so you at least know the pronunciation, which is a good place to start. Anglophones can’t get past what they see written. “Well, but that’s a ‘t’ it’s written as a ‘t’.” I says yeah, it’s pronounced [d].

[CA: And here’s where, actually, thinking of my students the having a bit of Introduction to Linguistics would help to say, well, look, this is a, this is an allophone and it’s voiced in these circumstances and voiceless here, someone who has Intro Linguistics might get that.]

Yup. I had students who will comment on the fact that they’ve taken a linguistics course and it has helped their pronunciation it does make them more aware of it. […]

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What I also do too is that I include culture with the language. I’ll be teaching them a particular word or phrase or expression but then I’ll tell them where it comes from — why it is this way — why we say it that way — why we don’t say this word. I mean, the word nyaweh in Mohawk gets interpreted as ‘thank you’ in English but that’s kind of the beginning and the end of it. We don’t, the reality is, if you follow older tradition, which is the way I was raised, you don’t say nyaweh for every little thing; you don’t use it the way it’s used in English. In English it’s just thank you thank you thank you — it becomes meaningless; it becomes a grunt, quite literally, in the English language, because people just use it so freely that it starts to lose its meaning. In Mohawk, nyaweh is used, or should only be used, between yourself and the Creator even when you say nyaweh, you know you see something beautiful, you see a sunset, a beautiful flower, nice majestic scenery or whatever, stuff like that, then you say nyaweh because now that nyaweh is directed towards the Creator and it’s showing appreciation for what you’re dealing with. When we sit at the table and we eat, the first one that gets up says nyaweh, not for the food, you know, but for, for the opportunity to sit with other people and share food. We’re getting into the habit of using it much the same way it’s used in English — you’ll hear young, young speakers, more contemporary ones that are using or learning the language, they’ll use nyaweh the same way they do and I said, No! (laughter).

I don’t know — there are certain things that we don’t, we don’t want to change, that we don’t particularly want to update because then it starts to erode our uniqueness. If you’re going to speak Mohawk the way you speak English, why don’t you just speak English? You can update certain things but other things you can’t. Like negating a future situation — in English, you can say, “Oh, it will not snow today!” How presumptive you are! (laughter) Because, just because the sky is blue, but there’s a cloud and you know the clouds — if there’s one cloud there’s another cloud and another cloud and another cloud and by the end of the day we could see snow, which is all within the realm of the “will” because the “will” is in the in future. We cannot negate the future.

[CA: So that’s, so that’s a cultural attitude that shows up in the grammar of Mohawk? That you don’t use negation with the future?]

You can construct a negative future. Nobody does. Fluent speakers don’t. I mean, why would you? You know, because it interferes… We have other ways of kind of getting around it right but … most people just wouldn’t. You just would not say, “it will not snow.” We can create what amounts to it, a negative sort of thing and we use it with the non-definite, which is like saying “it would not” or “there’s a possibility that it won’t” It would not… but the thing is that you cannot directly say, “it *will* not” so we go to a very fuzzy sort of a non-definite situation and we negate that. Cheating in a way but at the same time, it is an important cultural part of the language. I mean, the fact that you have a culture that that doesn’t negate the future — they deal with the future in a different sort of way — so those sorts of things, I think they have to be kept in language because they are the sort of things that add to the uniqueness of a particular language.

Word order in Mohawk. English has a set word order: subject-verb-object. Mohawk… Mohawk’s word order is, is quite literally whatever comes out of your mouth. What joins it all together are pronominal prefixes and that works. But because the pronunciation of Mohawk, the pronunciation of a word in Mohawk is set; however, due to the situation in which that word may occur within, within a statement or sentence, the accent on that word may shift. So okay fine, so if I say kahiatónhsera for “book” then the accent is on tón. Kahiatónhsera, okay fine, but if I say kahiatonhseráke, “on the book” that accent shifted to the penultimate syllable. So accent shifts on a word depending upon where that word occurs. English is a language blessed with one or two syllable words which actually puts English speakers in an odd situation since most of them seem to have a hard time pronouncing a word that has more than one, more than two syllables, (laughter) which makes my name really hard for them, “Oh, Kanatawakhon, oh, I can’t say that!” It’s worse if they see it written.

But the thing is, in Mohawk, word organization, word position is dependent on emphasis, so if I want to say, “The boy is walking on the road,” what am I saying?

“The BOY is walking on the road?” “raksá:’a ire ohaháke“.

or am I saying,

“The boy is WALKING on the road”? “ire raksá:’a ohaháke“.

Or am I saying,

“The boy is walking on the ROAD”? “ohaháke ire raksá:’a“.

So I shift my words around, there’s actually six arrangements of that, the three words and it’s all depending on, on emphasis. Also dependent upon if you’re answering a question. Because, “What did you buy?” “A COAT I bought.” Because the question what is asking, is asking for information which is then placed first which puts it in an emphasized position. That’s a very important part of the uniqueness of a language. So there are three very unique things with the language that we don’t want to, we can’t lose by modernizing it or contemporizing it. The language is set.

The culture that goes with the language … if you stop using a stone axe then eventually the word for stone axe is going to disappear unless for some reason … And then some vocabulary we’ve created in the past that we’ve carried through into the future like oháhsera, “a light” now is used primarily in reference to artificial lighting but originally it referred to something that looked very much like this bone oháhsa with the –ra suffix so then oháhsera just kind of gives the impression or gives the appearance of this particular bone and if you look at that bone and you look like a candle — yeah — so the thing is so we called the candles oháhsera, then lamps showed up. Well, more or less the same shape, oháhsera. Then lights, lamps, you know, living room lamps and stuff showed up, okay, oháhsera. Nowadays oháhsera refers to anything that throws artificial light, you know, ceiling lights, wall lights, the whole bit. So that is a word that has followed through time because even though we had your basic application but the shape kept changing.

[CA: That’s a natural semantic drift that happens in most languages…]

Yeah.

Video Script

Over the years I’ve been teaching Mohawk since ’91 … ’90-91 and I wanted to, I initially taught the course here, got the opportunity to teach the course because I wanted to see if the text material that I had developed for a language course would actually work. So I had developed a textbook and we used it the first year in that language course — mmmyeah, it did — as I modified it and I did things to it. That one sitting there that’s the most recent within the last five years. There is an audio that goes with that on a USB stick. That’s just the teaching text; there’s another one that’s called Supplements and it’s divided into ten, ten supplement areas, where you’ve got everything about numbers, everything about locations, everything about… And it’s equally as thick as that…

And then the band council back home, they finally got the opportunity to offer the Mohawk language in the public school there, so they wanted me to come home and teach it because I was quite literally the youngest speaker there and we didn’t have a lot of old folks in the community to draw on. So I said okay fine, I’ll, well I went back home and of course they said, “Okay there’s, here’s the Eastern school, here’s the Central School, here’s the Western school and then here’s the main school one, Grades 1, Grade 2, Grade 3 and then 4 to 8 and I drove to each one every day for a half an hour, about a half an hour of language in each one, sometimes 40 minutes. So my first year of teaching was Kindergarten to Grade One — Kindergarten to Grade 8, you know of course having to deal with an attitude all the way through, worst at the 7/8 level because they started to be a lot more like their parents, and a lot more annoying. And then your little guys you know, just soaked it all up and were a lot of fun.

But then, the band council says well here’s, here’s your job, here’s where you’re teaching, and here’s a hundred dollars a week. (laughter) No materials whatsoever, so I bought, I had to buy any materials that I needed for flashcards, for doing things within the class to help the kids learn and that sort of thing but one thing that there wasn’t was a textbook. There was, there was no available materials that they were using and that was pretty much everywhere, so you pretty much had to develop your own material so I started doing more and I got thinking well the language is a lot more than just words. And there are a lot of words that seem to be very much the same.

I taught for five years and about the fourth year came across this book published by Günther Michelson called A Thousand Words of Mohawk and it was all about the roots. And I bought a copy of this thing and I started looking at it, “Oh, wow, this makes so much sense.” So then I started, well maybe that is the better way to teach the language course.

[CA: So he had done the linguistics research to assemble the roots?]

Yeah, he was a linguist himself and of course, a lot of the linguistic work done on Iroquoian languages at the time was for the most part unreadable. (laughter) I didn’t have the education to deal with all that sort of weird and wonderful vocabulary. If I got a book, I had some linguistic stuff on the language, but as long as it provided enough examples that I could, then I could figure out what they were talking about … but … I really needed to have the examples. So I started doing his stuff and then gradually working this into, to doing the class, classroom stuff.

[CA: So it sounds like there could be a valuable role here for people who may not have, who may not know languages, Indigenous languages but know some linguistics to work with speakers of the language to create materials?]

Oh yeah, I think, if they, and if they’re going to be working with speakers they really do have to be somebody who has a sense of the grammar of the language. One of the things I learned how to do by trial and error was, learned how to ask the right question. Because speakers will tell you what comes to their mind. So we say, well what’s the word for “tree”? “Oh, kerhitáke“. Okay, eventually I learned that means “on the tree”. Kerhitákon, eventually I learned that was “in the tree”, and then, you know, they would give me all of these, tkerhitoke, “There’s a tree standing there,” and eventually I figured out that, kérhite was the word for “tree”. Oh, yeah, yeah, you’re telling us kérhite, yeah, that’s “tree”. (laughter)

But the thing is that, and when you’re asking them something, you know, a question like, you know, “I trust him.” You trust him for money? You trust him for what he says? You trust him for what he’s doing? You trust them to get the job done? What? Because those are all different, you know?

And, and the business of using pronominals — we have a subjective, objective and transitive, and they would mix them. Now this is a problem that was happening in the, in the language programs in the schools, is because the fluent speakers were suddenly, oh Aunt Maisie there, she’s a fluent speaker. Yeah, she’s 85 but she can teach these kids — what a horrible thing to do to an old woman (laughter) — but anyway, she could use the money, so. But the thing is that she had, as a fluent speaker she had no sense of the grammar of the language.

[CA: Right, didn’t have the metalinguistic awareness.]

Constantly mixing categories, constantly mixing, you know, mixing things up. “How come you said, wahahní:no yesterday and today you said rohahní:no for ‘he bought’?” They both kind of mean that, wahahní:no, “he just bought it”, rohahní:no, he bought it, but quite a while ago”.

[CA: Yeah, that’s something that my students in, in first-year linguistics struggle with making this, this unconscious implicit knowledge about how their language works and making that explicit. It’s a real challenge. Whatever, I mean, we mostly do it in English but whatever your native language is, it’s hard to become conscious…]

Yeah, so learning – learning to ask the right question, you know and, even when, when doing a sentence, you really have to pay attention to, to how they’re organizing the sentence, how they’re putting it together, and even though when they would say things, I would, “yeah, yeah, I know”. I have a sense of what they were saying, but (laughter), it just, sometimes it was so confusing, sometimes very frustrating, sometimes you would ask three or four different speakers the same thing and they would all tell you something different. Is it because there are four ways to say the same thing or is it not really the same thing but simply refers to similar situations?

Now, I mean, that, that textbook there is all about the grammar of the language — what you use where, how you organize it, what you say when, and stuff.

[CA: And it’s over your years of experience that you’ve assembled…]

Yeah. Over the years I’ve written five different language learning textbooks complete with, with exercises, drills and all the sort of stuff. That also has a book of exercises and drills to go with it. The difference is that is on, on audio, so it’s … you can, you’ll find the exact same textbook on screen which you can highlight the audio and get a pronunciation.

Video Script

[CA: I mean I was thinking about your students, like, are, are they going to speak Mohawk to their kids when they have kids, do you think?]

I think it’s really up to, up to the student, I mean, they may have thought you know learning the language is difficult. Finding a compatible partner who also speaks the language is going to be the real test. And some of them have, have found partners who, and they have raised kids, they’re raising kids together.

[CA: So are there kids who are growing up who are learning to speak it as they’re growing up?]

Yeah.

[CA: That’s starting to happen more?]

Yeah.

People don’t realize that learning language is a lifelong… I, every now and then I’ll run across vocabulary — oh yeah, wow this word — and then just … learning new vocabulary, words I hadn’t heard before or words that I’d heard but I didn’t have time to figure out the context and so, always in a state of language learning you know even after you’re a speaker.

We need language. I don’t know how we function without language. And nowadays with Native people you know, so much of this, this reconciliation thing going on and that sort of thing. Years ago in my home community, a lot of farmers that lived around the territory also spoke Mohawk. Very minimal in a way and stuff like that because they hired a lot of people from the territory to work on their farms. So they learned Mohawk. They learned it to a degree — you could go into stores in Deseronto and shopkeepers would, you know, would deal with, with the people in Mohawk. Now, it was Mohawk that would be related to the whole buying and selling and this sort of thing that but they did that. Now, to me, that’s an aspect of reconciliation. That’s where two groups have reconciled with each other — okay you’re there, you speak your language but I will learn to speak with you mostly because I want your money — and … we, you know, we’ll speak your language because we need your goods. I mean there’s always a give and take on any, any two groups that have reconciled with each other but I think at the same time, too, when people take time to learn your language, they do have a certain respect.

[CA: That’s what I was thinking — it certainly shows respect, that I value interacting with you enough to do it in your language.]

Yeah, and the ones that want to interact more, learn more of the language.

Video Script

Canada is a bilingual country … and I think if Canada learns to extend itself, we’ll start including more and more Aboriginal languages. I think Canada is, would be better to tout itself as a multilingual country. Because I think when doing that, even if they, if their definition of multilingualism is, is the two founding languages and then the Indigenous languages, you’re still looking at you know like fifty-five languages. And then because the difference, I think too, Native people have to be included in all that because we were here when English and French showed up. Okay, English and French showed up and they created the present-day institutions and stuff like that, okay fine. Everybody else who has come to this country basically has read the brochure and understood that English or French are the languages, therefore come to this country understanding that, okay I’m going to have to learn English or French because that’s how the company is organized, country is organized. Or if maybe I’ll go learn an Indigenous language as well. But the Indigenous languages have to be at the table.

[CA: The English and French arrived and didn’t say oh well we’re gonna have to learn the language that people speak — they said we’re here, now you’re gonna speak our language.]

Yeah, but you know initially they did learn our languages to deal with us because they didn’t have much choice. We had what they didn’t have and when we got to a point where we no longer had what they wanted, and of course, they wanted the land which meant pushing us off anyway, so the respect for the languages and stuff, kind of went out the door. Then it became well everybody here speaks English only. … I find that we need we need to have the languages. I think that gives us a greater sense of who we are — the language!

And, and the thing is that for, for Native people in this country we have spent so many years under the colonial thumb and so many years being convinced that our own languages and our traditions and everything that’s about us is inferior or not as good as … And the thing that I’ve found is that if you’re a Native person you can work your butt off to become as much like you know the non-native Canadian; at the end of the day your skin is still brown and that’s not going to change. If I focus on speaking Mohawk then in the process of learning my language I’m also learning Mohawk culture and what it is to be a Mohawk person and that’s, I think is something that is very important. We’ve gotten into the habit of being Indians or Natives or Aboriginals or Indigenous. Nowadays the word’s ‘Indigenous’. I think I keep telling my students, I said you know, I said, when I was born I was born an Indian but then I became a Native and then I became Aboriginal and then I became First Nations and now I’m Indigenous, yay! You know, Indigenous is the word of the 21st century and I’m sure they’ll find another one, but the word I would really like them to find and stick to is Mohawk, Oneida, Ojibwe, Chippewa. Know us by our nationalities, know us by our distinct cultures, know us by what makes us unique in the world.