When Danika Vickers opens her laptop every week and clicks the button to join the Zoom meeting, she knows that for the next couple of hours, her entire community will be in her living room. She sees the faces of her aunties, sitting a little too close to the camera, squinting as they ask “is this thing on?” She hears one of her uncles whispering the latest vocab words and practicing his glottalized resonants while thinking he’s on mute. A notification bearing the name of a chief—who moved to Hawai’i—pings in the corner of the screen, alerting Vickers he’s coming to tonight’s meeting.

Vickers is a Haíɫzaqv language warrior and instructor. For the last few years, she has devoted countless hours to teaching her language to other members of her nation. Every week Vickers hosts a free virtual class for anyone who is ready to take on the behemoth task of learning Haíɫzaqvḷa. It’s important to her that her class is virtual since her nation is flung all over the globe. 

Much progress has been made in the last decade over endangered Indigenous languages on Turtle Island. According to the Assembly of First Nations, every single one of the Indigenous languages within so-called Canada, save Inuktitut, are on the brink of extinction as first speakers die and the next generation struggles to carry on their ancestral tongues. Vickers’ language, Haíɫzaqvḷa, was recently featured in a documentary by The Guardian which explored the lives of the seven fluent speakers left. Seven people in the entire world. 

In introducing students—especially
non-Indigenous students to Kanyen’kéha—Martin is also teaching a different way to look at the world

The loss of language was never an organic phenomenon. According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, it was part of the Canadian government’s cultural genocide against Turtle Island’s Indigenous peoples. Children who were abducted and sent to residential schools for decades were not permitted to speak their languages and ultimately lost them, either due to being made to forget or the trauma associated with the words they were punished for speaking. 

Language and knowledge keepers though, never stopped fighting to protect what is rightfully theirs. Against the colonizing forces, some Indigenous people did pass on languages to their children—elders, like Marie Wilcox, who spent the final years of her life painstakingly typing every Wukchumni word she could remember into an online dictionary that has since outlived her. In popular culture too, young people are taking up the challenge of re-introducing their languages to the world, as is the case with the Polaris Prize-winning album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa by Jeremy Dutcher. 

At the age of six, Vickers’ mother moved to Québec, where Vickers got her first job as her mom’s translator. Young Vickers quickly picked up on the French spoken around her, which meant she was to accompany her mom as she ran errands deep in francophone territory. This experience would crystallize for Vickers, becoming formative in her belief that language is both nation and connection. 

“I am the first out of four generations to not be classified as a survivor,” said Vickers of her family. “My late Nan and Papa George were residential school survivors. My late Nan was one of our last speakers who could create new words about the modern world around us and our language.”  

“They had eight kids. One of them is my ǧáǧṃ́a, my grandma, and she was a boarding school survivor. She was put into that, which is very similar to residential schools, [but was] more in the community–not any less violent. My mom is a Sixties Scoop survivor and was taken off rez and put into the foster care system,” she said. 

It was after another move to Atlanta with her mother and siblings that Vickers had a realization that re-routed her life. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Vickers began listening to the podcasts about Indigenous storytellers such as All My Relations and Two Crees in a Pod. While listening she came across Wôpanâak language revitalizer Jessie Little Doe Baird. On the podcast, Little Doe Baird recounted a dream in which her ancestors spoke to her but she was unable to understand their words. 

“That really hit home, because I start to think about all my ancestors who never had to speak English, were never beaten into speaking English and being on the other side and having no one to talk to,” said Vickers. 

Inspired by her ancestors, Vickers began learning Haíɫzaqvḷa through Zoom classes. Her work would bring her back to Haíɫzaqv territory in British Columbia where she began a 900-hour language immersion program and became involved in multiple language revitalization projects, including the Endangered Languages Project and the creation of an interactive, online Haíɫzaqvḷa dictionary through FirstVoices—an international organization promoting the revitalization of Indigenous languages. This is Vickers’ way of doing good, a core tenet of the Haíɫzaqv Nation, “Haíɫzaqv” literally meaning “to act and speak in a good way.” 

“We actually have stories from our old people that, when we are not doing things in a good way, when we are not [upholding responsibilities], our people suffer the consequences and we lose people, and people are taken to the spirit world because of it,” says Vickers. “It’s really embedded. Like, okay, we should be doing things in a good way, which is really complicated these days because of all the colonial systems.”

The state—which is so often the perpetrator of the colonial violence at the heart of Indigenous language loss—now also bears the responsibility to reconcile their past actions of language suppression and eradication. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recognized this, requesting the Canadian government enact an Aboriginal Languages Act in its 14th of 94 Calls to Action in 2015.

Similar programs have been implemented in New Zealand/Aotearoa where the state government implemented a program to ensure 20 per cent of the population will speak te reo Māori by 2040. So far, according to their website, the Canadian government has not announced any similarly ambitious legislation. 

While the federal government continues to stall on enacting Call to Action 14 as well as Call to Action 10—which asks that Indigenous language programs become credit courses—many have taken language revitalization into their own hands from within colonial institutions. 

Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) currently hosts four Indigenous language and culture courses, all focusing on Kanyen’kéha and Haudenosaunee cultures. Each of these courses were developed by Brandon Tehanyatarí:ya’ks Martin who says he has another oral storytelling-based course at TMU in the works. In introducing students—especially non-Indigenous students to Kanyen’kéha—Martin is also teaching a different way to look at the world. 

In speaking Kanyen’kéha, individual relationships to people and things are highly considered. The way that verbs are conjugated is entirely dependent on who is talking to whom. This means that the entire language can slide and shift in 14 different ways that don’t exist in English, all depending on the relationship between speaking parties, Martin explains. 

Martin is also able to take advantage of the descriptive nature of Kanyen’kéha to teach his students words for modern technologies and phenomena that may not have existed when Indigenous languages were most widely used. As Vickers alluded to before, not every language has this capability, which is also part of why it is so important to protect and preserve the work of people who speak Indigenous languages as a first language, also called ‘L1’ speakers, Martin shares. 

“The word that we have for television is kaya’tárha. So it’s kind of like ‘a picture that is set up.’ Similarly for a computer, we would say kawennárha—the word that I learned for that would be ‘words set up,’” said Martin. “The descriptive nature of Kanyen’kéha lends itself well to being able to produce words.”

Still, access to post-secondary education remains a huge barrier to Indigenous peoples in Canada, with Indigenous enrolment consistently ranking over 20 points behind the general population. The Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario estimates that 22,500 Indigenous students have been prevented from attending post-secondary education due to inadequate government funding. Universities remain integral in manufacturing legitimacy for the study of Indigenous languages but hefty tuition fees may keep Indigenous students out. Not to mention, the development of L1 speakers has to happen long before university. 

“Think about what you want your daughter to be like,” Otsistohkwί:yo Elliott was pregnant with her first child when Bear Clan Mother, Louise McDonald Herne asked this. Elliott was raised by her father, a Mohawk land defender and protester from Six Nations of the Grand River. At the age of 14, Elliott would meet a delegation of the Sioux Unity Riders from North Dakota who were spurred on by a vision from their ceremonial pipe carrier. These Unity Riders brought Elliott into the company of other Mohawk communities, including McDonald Herne and her children. 

“[McDonald Herne] is a first language speaker and—all her kids—she’s raised them as first language speakers,” said Elliott of the Bear Clan Mother. “So they were about my age and I knew them and they were speaking the language together. They knew the songs. But usually when we’re at protests [we’re] speaking English. It’s hard, really, to find spaces that are just language spaces.” 

As she carried her own daughter, Elliott thought back to this feeling in her own childhood, meeting kids like her who spoke Kanyen’kéha. She says she wanted that future for her child but it wasn’t as simple as just putting her daughter in a bilingual school. To cradle her daughter in the Mohawk language, Elliott had to learn it first for herself. 

“When I started the [language] program, I was a single mother with a baby,” says Elliott of when she started at Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa, a language school near Brantford, Ont. “I had a nine-month old and I was raising her on my own on welfare, on assisted housing. I dropped out of university for health problems.” 

Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa was only able to pay participants $300 per week for a program which equated to a full-time job in terms of work according to Elliott. Monday to Friday, for seven hours per day, he clocked in at Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa where she was fully immersed in Kanyen’kéha. In order to attend, Elliott had to put her daughter into a daycare provided by Ontario Works for parents living below the poverty line. 

“Being a single mom, I needed people to watch my children,” said Elliott. “I did not have a choice [in] the daycare she went to when she was nine months old. They didn’t have any speakers, there was no option for it. There is still no option for immersion childcare. Either you are making no money, and if you have means to not make money and just stay at home and just speak the language, some people do have to do that.” 

When Elliott became proficient in Kanyen’kéha she was given the opportunity to become a traditional storyteller at her daughter’s daycare. That job would eventually blossom into a full-time job at Everlasting Tree School—a first-of-its-kind Kanyen’kéha immersion school—as their resident storyteller and, increasingly, drama teacher. Elliott visits every class at the school and shares traditional stories like the origins of the Great Bear and the Big Dipper. Elliott has also written some of the first-ever Mohawk-language children’s plays to be performed at the Everlasting Tree School. 

Elliott also points to the advantages of Kanyen’kéha as a language that easily lends itself to painting pictures. In addition to these traditional stories, she writes stories about specific issues in students’ lives: Haudensosaunee territory spans the borders of Canada and the U.S. and during the pandemic one child found himself separated from his father who was stuck on the other side.

Elliott’s story features a young animal who crosses a bridge every day—across a raging river—to visit his father. One day a storm knocks the bridge down and the animal is trapped on the opposite side of the river. A kindly hawk swoops down and volunteers to take messages across the river to help the animal family stay in touch while the bridge is rebuilt. 

“That’s how we teach the numbers—I go through the full creation story with the children and through the telling of the creation story, each of the numbers show up and we explain their origin and where they come from. Like ‘two’ being from the two twins that were born, ‘three’ from the three sisters,” says Elliott on implementing Mohawk epistemology into her teaching. 

Still, Elliott sees that far too often the best Kanyen’kéha speakers are forced to leave her community in Six Nations if they want to practice with fluent speakers, or get paid for their thousands of hours of work learning Kanyen’kéha. 

“Our speakers—if they want to be teachers—not only do they have to learn a language but they have to get their bachelor’s degree,” said Elliott. “These are some of the most expert people out there and they’re getting paid pennies on the dollar for what they do. If Canada was really serious about reversing the effects that they did through residential schools by the basic destruction of our languages, they would be supporting the revitalization of it, not just through a grant—a one time grant here and there.”  

“11,000 years of history will not disappear with Janvier”

Willis Janvier understands the value of a good teacher. Of all the people spoken to in this article he was the only L1 speaker, having grown up immersed in his language in Clearwater River, Dene Nation near La Loche, Sask. 

Janvier would spend his days at school being taught Dene by his grandmother who worked at his elementary school. He spent his nights hanging out in the corner of his dad’s office as he broadcasted hockey games in Dene for Saskatchewan’s Indigenous radio network, MBC. 

In spite of this, Janvier’s father didn’t influence his career as a podcaster at Dene Yati Media, a business he created during the pandemic. Janvier says it’s the fear of failure, rather, that pushed him to create his podcast, bolstered by a conversation he had with his sister about taking the leap of faith. He committed to promoting his language full time after overcoming addiction and the relentless slog of a blue-collar job shovelling dirt into holes day after day.

“I was in Fort Saint John in B.C. and on the way there, I was sitting next to an archeologist from the area and I said, ‘what’s the oldest thing you found?’” said Janvier of an interaction he had while on tour promoting Dene Yati Media. “[He said] ‘11,000 years ago.’ I said, ‘my language is that old,’ you know. The words that I speak are that old.” 

11,000 years of history will not disappear with Janvier, nor will it falter in his daughter who he has spoken to in Dene since birth. Like Elliott, Janvier committed early on to making sure that his daughter understood the legacy that she was a part of. Janvier says his daughter, who is 13 going on 14 (something she won’t let him forget), introduces herself to others as a Dene woman, something her dad is assuredly proud of. 

“She always says I love you in Dene,” says Janvier about the next generation speaker he helped raise.