The Native Language Question

A major question entailing the status of Indigenous languages in Canada has begun to agitate the public atrium, especially in the province of British Columbia. Indigenous tongues are minority languages spoken by a minority people. The point is that tribal populations were educated in national and residential schools not to give their languages privilege of place in the public sphere but, on the contrary, to join the mainstream communities of English and French speakers to improve their lot in life and to become full members of mainstream society.

The program involved Confederation poet and Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs between 1879 and 1932 Duncan Campbell Scott and prime minister Mark Carney’s father Robert J. Carney, principal of an Indian day school, superintendent of school programmes, and Deputy Director of the Albertan Department of Indian Affairs between the years 1962 and 1976. Both men were assured of their bona fides — though Scott is now the victim of righteous opprobrium as a “racist,” and Mark Carney has duly repudiated his father’s spirited defence of residential schools.

There is, of course, no objection to learning aboriginal languages, as early missionaries and fur traders clearly did, a fact meticulously detailed in Adam Shoalts’ A History of Canada in Ten Maps. Scholars who study Indian customs and societies should also learn the language in question, though few do. Former Native Studies professor Jeff Muehlbauer of Brandon University in Manitoba, who is fluent in Cree and its various dialects — the language of his students — points out that the academies were determined to indigenize the curriculum and promote courses on “indigenous science, multiple ways of knowing, and cultural sensitivity programs.” Cultural sensitivity is well and good, but Indigenous people never practiced genuine theoretical and experimental science, and “multiple ways of knowing” is academic-speak for topical responses to local environmental issues. They are customs and beliefs, pragmatic solutions to concrete problems, not formal disciplines.

Unfortunately, Native Studies programs “have shed their scholarly origins [and] are being filled with faculty who have no knowledge… of the languages they speak,” wrote Muehlbauer. The Cree, for example, had no written language; a syllabics system was devised by Reverend James Evans in 1840, which the Cree learned in the mission schools and which Muehlbauer, one of a sparse handful of genuine preceptors, knew and taught. True written language is a basic criterion of civilization. Predicated on a developed system of stable graphic symbols to record information, legal judgments, and commercial transactions, it is a late acquisition among the aboriginal peoples. As such, Indian languages surely do not merit public prominence.

Indeed, there should be no principle or compulsion to bring these languages into the public domain, where they are neither read nor spoken. They are the languages that indigenous people can speak or write at home, in the meeting house, or in parochial schools. In the wider Canadian society, French and English are the heritage languages. What is at work here is a condition of fake empathy by a public that has been made to feel ashamed of everything they are and represent — the color of their skin, their history, their language, their prosperity — that is, of their presumably colonial past.

Indian languages and dialects, as noted, were spoken tongues that can claim only minority status. They do not unify a cohesive group; 50 indigenous languages are spoken among British Columbia’s 204 and Canada’s 630 different aboriginal identities. They are not the equivalent of majority languages that unify entire nations and integrate large populations, and should not be accorded gala status or set on a par with major national languages. Indian tongues brindling the landscape and increasingly stippling legal documents are a form of compliance if not surrender, supported by ideological socialist governments and UN programs (UNDRIP) against Western sovereignties.

We should not, then, exalt Canada’s indigenous tribal languages as a way of patronizing a minority to its false presumption of special importance and propping up our own misconception as good Samaritans. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist #1, “A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for firmness and efficiency of government.”

Tribes need to stop posturing and fronting land cred in multiple sorties to the government and the judiciary. Clearly, too many crooks spoil the brothel. We need to cease condescending and, as Hamilton stressed, learn to be firm and efficient. We need to begin living together as equals, which requires going up, not down. We need a commitment to civilized norms, a recognition of the importance of a moral compass in reciprocal affairs, even if not regularly practiced, and a common tongue, whether French or English, to serve as a given in public places, street names, towns and larger regions, and legal documents. In short, the bench strength to lift the values and privileges of the majority culture over its minor competitors is long overdue.

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