“At risk” languages and the road to recovery: a case from the Yukon

Abstract

This article traces the various ways that “languages at risk” in the Yukon Territory, Canada, are imagined and managed across a range of “stakeholders.” Predicated on a history of oppression and the management of risk in the U.S. and Canada, aboriginal language endangerment has arisen from insecurities about communicative diversity. Conversely language revitalization has arisen from insecurities about the loss of diversity. As this article demonstrates, ideologies of loss and the insecurities entailed therein resonate differently across different speakers, language activists, and institutions, resulting in different perceptions of loss, different experiences of risk, and different approaches to recovery. Moving from policy and the institutionalization of aboriginal languages to people’s reflections and concerns about their own welfare, this article argues that insecurities about language are ultimately insecurities about other vulnerabilities, including the shifting political-moral terrain of the nation-state and First Nations.

Introduction

Aboriginal language endangerment arises from insecurities about aboriginal, individual and linguistic diversity, predicated on a history of settler colonialism in the U.S. and Canada articulated through policies and practices of erasure (or genocide; Niezen 2016). Here, diversity puts a unified nation at risk if it lacks an assimilated citizenry. For the Canadian nation-state, at risk is the failure of First Nations peoples to function as productive Canadian citizens and their complicating national attempts at a unified expression of nationhood and acceptance of federal governance. By contrast, language revitalization reflects concerns about diversity—the facets of life that inflect Indigeneity and Indigenous languages are at risk. Focusing on First Nations communities associated with the eight recognized Indigenous languages in the Yukon Territory, the insecurity of declining speakers is intimately entangled with insecurities regarding health and well-being.¹ Language endangerment is not only about the future of Indigenous languages; it is crucially about the health and well-being of Indigenous communities (Whalen et. al. 2016).

By framing this analysis in terms of “risk” and being “at risk,” I acknowledge the biological and financial models that inform the ideologies of loss that pervade analyses, discourses, and institutional attempts to redress aboriginal language endangerment. The concept of “risk” as a financial investment motivated early legislators and policymakers to describe the “Indian” situation as a drain on national resources (rather than the reverse). The popular rhetorics of early and late settler colonialism strategically referenced this as a burden “imposed by” First Nations for their own upkeep and financed by federal governments and their tax-paying citizens. (cf. Chaat Smith 2009). Whereas the financial model of risk attends to the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler governments, the biological model of risk focuses on conditions within Indigenous communities (e.g. rates of suicide, diabetes, and alcoholism), ignoring external causes of deterioration and highlighting the manageable aspects of distress, if only to ease the inevitability of the condition (death) (cf. Errington 2003). Biological analogies assess Native peoples as being “at risk” of losing their heritage and all Indigenous languages as endangered, whether true or not (see also Davis 2017; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Leonard 2011). Both models situate First Nations peoples squarely at risk.

Giddens’s conception of action (1979, 1984) states that in every action lies a risk of failure. Coupled with Goffman’s sense of risk (1959, 1969)² —all interactions are risky—all action, individual or institutional, involves risk management. Risk is the assessment of degrees of variance between action and imagined outcome in relation to an actor’s capacity to mitigate risk and trust in others’ uptake. For First Nations, this assessment has largely been in terms of failure (Meek 2011). Indigenous language practices are heard as discrepant cross-generationally; younger generations fail to acquire their elders’ aboriginal varieties, putting them at risk of extinction, (or so the narrative goes; cf. Davis 2017). The expectation of failure is drawn from generalizations, rather than from everyday interaction and on-the-ground actions (e.g., Meek 2016). By contrast, Giddens’s and Goffman’s theories of action and risk suggest that such generalizations are derived from routines that emerge from and within interactional situations. Processes of routinization then arrange people’s social worlds, creating expectations. Degrees of risk mark degrees of variation from some taken-for-granted routine, the “gamble” being how far one can get before the variation is noticed. (cf. Goffman 1969). Aboriginal language “endangerment” assesses risk as degrees of variation from some idealized “original” language to some idealized future interactional situation that preserves this “original” form. Deeming a language “at risk” is an evaluation of sociolinguistic futurity, in that a language may or may not continue to be produced by new generations of interlocutors in the language’s idealized historical form (cf. Leonard 2011). In turn, insecurities arise from such assessments of risk; that is, if a language will continue to exist. The stakes of this risk vary; not all stakeholders are equally invested in balancing linguistic “actions” with the goals of aboriginal language maintenance and revitalization, nor do they assess risk in the same way. Given this, several questions arise: what’s at risk? How is risk assessed? By whom? How have First Nations peoples turned their own risk of loss into the territory’s and nation’s risk of loss? What vulnerabilities remain?

In this article, I examine the emergence and management of risk through aboriginal language efforts in the Yukon Territory, Canada.³ I begin with the ways that “at risk” languages in this region have been imagined and institutionalized across a range of “stakeholders”: individuals and organizations somehow invested in aboriginal languages. First Nations peoples have been—and continue to be— “at risk” themselves, whether in direct relation to national policies or federally supported programs. This article moves from policy and regimenting aboriginal languages and peoples to people’s reflections and concerns about their own welfare by arguing that language insecurities are ultimately insecurities about other vulnerabilities regarding the shifting and unpredictable political-moral terrain of the nation-state and First Nations.

Background: institutionalizing aboriginal languages in the Yukon

When I arrived as a naïve but earnest graduate student researcher embarking on my dissertation fieldwork in 1998, aboriginal language revitalization had already begun in the Yukon Territory. Spearheaded in the 1970s by First Nations politicians and activists, aboriginal language concerns rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. The then Council of Yukon Indians (now Council for Yukon First Nations) initiated the first steps toward preserving and revitalizing the Territory’s aboriginal languages and set up the Yukon Native Languages Project to manage them, which evolved into today’s Yukon Native Language Centre (www.ynlc.ca; see McDonald 2019: 8-10). By the 1990s, the emphasis on preservation and revitalization became institutionalized as the result of negotiations between the Yukon Territorial Government, the Council for Yukon Indians (representing the eight officially recognized territorial First Nations), and the Canadian government. The negotiations focused on land claims and the establishment of First Nations’ self-governance under the Umbrella Final Agreement, which cemented the rights, goals, and opportunities of the First Nations and the responsibilities of the territorial and national governments. This agreement included three commitments: providing training and education in people’s “traditional” or heritage languages; promoting “the recording and preservation of traditional languages, beliefs, oral histories, and cultural knowledge of Yukon Indian people; and working with Aboriginal people in the interpretation of cultural materials” (Meek 2009:156). By articulating these commitments and recognizing First Nations as their own governing bodies, this Agreement provided First Nations with a platform for developing and protecting their interests. It also minimized a risk of management failure by implementing a process of devolution whereby First Nations became self-governing and gradually took over certain government offices (such as Aboriginal Language Services).

Additionally, the Yukon Government negotiated an exception to Canada’s Official Languages Act in the 1980s, adopting a territory-wide language policy that recognized English, French, and eight aboriginal languages spoken in the Yukon Territory: Han, Kaska, Tlingit, Upper Tanana, Tagish, Southern Tutchone, Northern Tutchone, and Gwich’in. This Act stated that “the Yukon recognizes the significance of aboriginal languages in the Yukon and wishes to take appropriate measures to preserve, develop, and enhance those languages” (Yukon Languages Act 1988). This strategic move linguistically enfranchised First Nations so aboriginal languages would have legal standing and licensed use in Canada. While this Act incorporated aboriginal languages and established them as part of territorial governance, what dimensions of risk did these two legislations address?

Insecure citizenship: Indian Status and other (genocidal) acts of incorporation

A partial answer can be found in recent political pronouncements, such as the following by former prime minister Paul Martin at the 2013 Montreal Hearings: “Let us understand that what happened at the residential schools was the use of education for cultural genocide, and that the fact of the matter is — yes it was. Call a spade a spade” (CBC News, April 26, 2013). The Indian residential schools of Canada were established around the same time as those in the United States and run with similar philosophies, the goal being the “gradual civilization” of First Nations peoples through their “enfranchisement,” as defined in the Indian Act of 1867.⁴ This act consolidated previous legislation pertaining to Indians and defined both their status as Indians and the government’s responsibility for them. Schooling was a significant dimension of his legislation, defining funding, attendance, respect for religious (Christian) denomination, and consequences for truancy. These schools were funded by the Canadian government and administered primarily by Christian churches. No matter the conduit, the goals of these bureaucratic and educational institutions were to assimilate Indians as citizens into the Canadian nation, “to encourage the progress of Civilization among the Indian Tribes in [Canada], and the gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty’s other Canadian Subjects” (Statutes of the Province of Canada,1857). The “progress of Civilization” and the “gradual removal of all legal distinctions” reflected and aggravated the insecurities that abounded economically, politically, and socially.

A similar bureaucratic move re-emerged in the guise of the 1969 “white paper,” a policy paper that advocated for the dissolution of Indian status as part of the Canadian government’s approach to improving the quality of life for aboriginal peoples. It the Canadian government’s (PM Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, Minister of Indian Affairs) response to the findings of a research team headed by UBC anthropologist Harry B. Hawthorn, which found Canada’s aboriginal peoples to be the most disadvantaged and marginalized group, attributed in part to the failure of residential schooling to successfully assimilate Indians. This became public at a time in North American history when racial tensions were high, and the civil rights movement was afoot in the United States. People felt insecure about their relationships to the nation and to each other. In the U.S., President L. B. Johnson was working toward passing the Civil Rights Act: “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation, but not a fact” (speech from May 30, 1963, marking the 100^th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address). Racial tensions and insecurities ran deep in North America (and continue to, as the death of George Floyd and subsequent demands for equity and justice highlight).

In Canada and the Yukon Territory, the racialization of First Nations people became a justification of the two-tiered system of labor that positioned Native peoples as subservient to non-Native peoples. During the Klondike Goldrush, for example, Native people worked as camp laborers, preparing food for miners, stocking wood piles, and handling transport for the “white” supervisors, investors, and miners (personal communication, LFN elders; see also Coates 1991). Historian Ken Coates argues that this segregation resulted from two ideologies: to protect the “childlike” Indian from debauchery, and to maintain non-Native “purity” and “cleanliness” (1991:93), which echo Andrew Jackson’s policies of Indian removal in the U.S. Though unsuccessful, segregation remains in the Yukon today as an artifact of the creation of Indian settlement areas and followed by the recent incorporation of these areas as part of the officially recognized traditional territories of First Nations who have settled land claims agreements. Coates continues to demonstrate that this theme of debauchery and uncivilized behavior was maintained throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This 1966 description of the state of affairs in Upper Liard, a Kaska-speaking settlement, portrayed the community as degenerate and unruly:

Upper Liard is a village of problems. The people are apathetic, unskilled and often unemployed. Children are poorly cared for. Severe drinking is wide spread, reaching down to the younger school age group. While the adults drink, night after night, the school children wander the village, sometimes until day break (sic). Violent strife frequently breaks out in manifestation of the ever present hostility between factions and families, husbands and wives. There have been killings. We have reason to expect more.

(Coates 1991:227)

The social construction of native peoples as either “childlike” or “savages”—a historic image produced and reproduced through the present (Berkhofer 1978, Deloria 1998)— deterred individuals from claiming Native ancestry, which Eva Garroutte has called a “legacy of insecurity and pain” (2003). Thus, at risk of being called out as an Indian, aboriginal people tried to hide their heritage in situations where their difference might negatively stand out, including linguistically.

Linguistic insecurity and residential schooling in the Yukon

“If anything, it was through residential school that we lost our language.”

Kaska Elder (fieldnotes, 1999)

In an environment where the home language is the prominent language in schools, on television, at the grocery store and elsewhere, insecurities around speaking tend to center on styles of speech, pronunciation, and spelling, where one can rationalize the judgments of others as extensions of instructional habits (acting like a teacher), generational ticks (behaving like an elder), or elitist entitlements. For an endangered language that might not even be spoken within the security of one’s own home, statements about a person’s speech take on radically different valences. Layered within institutional, regional, national, and historical acts of ideological—and real—contempt (á la Nancy Dorian, 1998:12), habits of correction and commentary evoke negative interpretations and trigger First Nations speakers’ anxieties.

Residential schooling has been identified as the key institution that links trauma and aboriginal language loss. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada heard many hours of testimony from First Nations people on the abuses they suffered for speaking their languages in these schools (http://nctr.ca/reports.php). In the Yukon, these schools created an atmosphere where speaking an aboriginal language could be read as shameful; the silencing of heritage language(s) was experienced as another form of trauma (McDonald 2019: 32-33, 44). Most adults and some elders in the Kaska community in the Watson Lake area attended the Lower Post residential school, run by the Catholic Church. This school opened in response to the Anglican residential school in Carcross and educated First Nations children from 1949 until 1975, when it was the last residential school to be closed (Coates 1991:205).⁵ Lower Post functioned similarly to other federal Indian schools by “demanding that the Natives abandon their aboriginal language, accept Christian teachings, and abide by the strict social codes of the school” (Coates 1991: 202). Or, as Kaska elder Mary Caesar reported to Leonard Linklater on CBCRadio in 2021, “[the] residential school was run by really sadistic priests and nuns and supervisors. […] They were monsters.” (June 29, 2021; https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-206-midday-cafe/clip/15852503-yukon-survivor-lower-post-residential-school-prepares-its). The strict codes of conduct and linguistic prohibitions set the stage for on-going insecurities expressed by First Nations peoples in relation to speaking and being Native, especially in non-Native spaces.

First Nations elders in the Yukon have reflected on the discomfort, shame, and fear they felt speaking their languages in non-aboriginal spaces. In public, individuals were ashamed to use their own language because it evoked negative attention. A Northern Tutchone speaker remarked to me once that while in Dawson, a non-Native person came up to her and her friend and told them to stop “speaking Indian.” Without question, they stopped. These acts of silencing also seeped into family interactions. Linda McDonald, who has discussed her own experiences growing up in the Yukon (McDonald and Meek 2016), remarked that,

Although my family did not attend Residential Schools like many of my peers, we suffered some of the same prejudices against First Nation Languages demonstrated by the society. I recall asking my father not to speak in Kaska when we were in town, grocery shopping or elsewhere in public. I clearly recall feeling embarrassed and this self-loathing in relation to being (and speaking) Kaska worsened as I got older.

Even now, she finds that “when I am speaking in the community, very few people speak to me in Kaska. If I am spoken to in Kaska, and I ask someone to repeat what they have said, they switch to English.” Additionally, Native language speakers around the Yukon often shared that it was impolite to “speak Indian” around those who did not understand the language, especially non-Natives. The focus on politeness overlaid another explanation. A number of Native people remarked that non-Native speakers, upon hearing an aboriginal language being spoken, interpret the discourse as being about them and in particular, as mocking them. As a result, Native speakers refrain from using their aboriginal languages in public around non-Native speakers. The settler-colonial impact of these experiences is two-fold: they reinforce a pervasive hostility toward First Nations’ practices and languages, and they further oppress First Nations’ communities through an expectation of accommodation, or “politeness,” privileging the insecurities of the dominant English-speaking Canadian polity over those of First Nations peoples.

In private, heritage language use has also declined, replaced by an emphasis on speaking English. Several Kaska parents explained this replacement as stemming in part from their parents’ and other elders’ fear that their children would be subjected to the same disciplinary action and scrutiny that they had experienced during adolescence. Younger generations today often attribute these fears to contexts where speaking an aboriginal language was prohibited and enforced through corporal punishment, including at the aforementioned residential school. As one young adult surmised,

A lot of people, I guess, say they were forbidden from speaking their language and stuff, that’s probably because that’s the only thing they could speak at the time, their (Native) language.

(Adult, interview, 3/1999)

Their statement underscores the conundrum that First Nations peoples faced: an expectation that they speak the dominant language, when all they knew how to speak was their own language (and perhaps a few other aboriginal languages).

Oftentimes linguistic documentation projects gave rise to shared frustrations over aspects of these experiences. In between elicitation sessions, elder participants would narratively detail their own “legacy of insecurity and pain,” describing the sanctions and punishments that nuns, priests, and other school staff imposed on miscreants caught speaking aboriginal languages. At times, these narratives extended the insecurities beyond language to examples of vulnerability and the riskiness of being aboriginal—especially for women—through memories of encounters with transient non-Native laborers or travelers on the Alaska-Canada highway. These encounters frequently left aboriginal families and women emotionally and physically scarred. Their discourses of loss encompassed both language and life.

The insecurities instilled institutionally and socially have deterred many Yukon First Nations people from speaking their languages openly, often reducing their communicative repertoires to English or to silence (cf. McDonald 2019). This leveling of linguistic difference accommodated a national need to incorporate aboriginal peoples into the nation, aid in their transformation into productive citizens, and begin to lessen the national uncertainty surrounding their (uncivilized) difference.

Aboriginal insecurities and language loss in the Yukon

Contemporary aboriginal language discourse in the Yukon emphasizes a range of insecurities pertaining to loss: loss of language, loss of knowledge, loss of identity. The territorial government produced reports and statements that emphasized a portrait of language loss (Meek 2016). In part, such representations were intended to motivate Yukon citizens to support the Yukon government’s aboriginal language initiatives, either as sympathetic bystanders or active participants. The government also employed a rhetoric that identified all Yukon citizens as responsible for its aboriginal languages, as individuals whose Yukon identity is defined in part through these aboriginal languages and a First Nations’ presence (Meek 2009, 2016). Similar to the role of American Indians in the construction of U.S. nationalism, the Yukon First Nations emblematically rendered the Yukon Territory distinct and unique from any other territory or province—the loss of any part of this aboriginality would compromise all Yukoners’ identity as a Yukoner.

In First Nations’ discourse, loss of language also became equated with a loss of identity; however, this was understood as a loss of knowledge about the past and how to be or behave. In this trope of loss, not being able to speak one’s heritage language and not knowing one’s aboriginal mother tongue contributed to health issues. In fact, many First Nations individuals attribute the previously mentioned debauched and alcoholic lifestyle to a loss of knowledge that can only be known through one’s aboriginal mother tongue:

One of the social effects of this loss of knowledge is seen in the many young people who are lost. Language is really important to maintain identity, but it is hard to do.

(Administrator, local language planning meeting, 5/11/1998)

The link between language and identity has also led stakeholders to consider health implications. Researchers have begun investigating the relationship between aboriginal languages and health (Coe et. al. 2004, Whalen et. al. 2016; on diabetes, see Oster et. al. 2014; on alcohol abuse, see Stone et. al. 2006, Whitbeck et. al. 2004) and mental health in particular (e.g. Chandler and Lalonde 1998). Building on Chandler and Lalonde (1998), Hallett, Chandler and Lalonde (2007) revealed a negative correlation between aboriginal language use and youth suicide. They show that aboriginal language practices, more than any other cultural “continuity” factor, correlates with positive health and well-being among Aboriginal youth in British Columbia (2007:398). This finding is echoed in a statement by a Yukon First Nations administrator involved in promoting local aboriginal language initiatives: “We need to speak the language to feel good, and to keep a positive image” (from Meek 2010: 150).

While identity has often been linked to language, a sense of historical loss and the need for persistence also became linked with the discourse of language loss circulating in the Yukon. Again, such sentiments often found overt expression at aboriginal language planning meetings, such as the following (from Meek 2010:147):

We need to teach them (the children) the Dene k’eh …We need to tell our kids how we grew up a long time ago…Kids are trained different in school. They don’t know their names, their tribes if they don’t have the language… We need to tell stories and then they (the children) will understand. I still remember my grandparents’ stories.

(Elder (female), language planning meeting, 5/11/98)

I would teach the language, about the long time ago ways, about ways of making a living.

(Elder (female), language planning meeting, 5/11/98)

Younger generations also shared this perspective on the relationship between language and history as expressed by Elders. The administrator quoted above also articulated this connection in a later statement at the same meeting, remarking that “[c]oncerns about language are being expressed in community meetings. As elders are passing away, the history and the language is [sic] passing away with them” (language planning meeting, 5/11/1998). In her research on using conversation to encourage Kaska language growth and overcome experiences of abuse, McDonald (2019) noted a similar sentiment. In appeals to governments, local language advocates often articulate these perspectives when addressing their own First Nation, their children, and their grandchildren, in addition to petitioning for support from non-Native government officials and educators employed by the Yukon Territory. This theme of “language as history” links language with cultural knowledge about appropriate ways to be and to interact with the world. They also highlight the relationship between language and identity: to really know who you are, you need to know your heritage through your heritage language. In addition to these public and semi-public events, statements from interviews and questionnaires collected between 1998 and 2001 reiterate these themes (from Meek 2010:147):

“It’s my history, my families’ history and culture.”

“To better understand history from a Kaska point of view.”

“To bring back memories, traditional lifestyle.”

“To learn more about history and culture, and relate to elders.”

“To know the stories that have been passed on for generations, stories of different areas.”

Ranging in age from mid-twenties to over sixty, many of the respondents spoke Kaska themselves or had parents or grandparents who regularly spoke Kaska at home and with each other. In all of these statements, the theme of “language as history” underscored discourses about appropriate interaction and cultural knowledge. Furthermore, language change within First Nations communities had been discussed almost entirely in terms of knowledge and the deteriorating socio-cultural circumstances of aboriginal language use (in contrast to grammatical or interactional change).

The risk of this loss of knowledge is recognized by almost all Kaska people. However, the assessment of risk varies. In our conversations, Linda McDonald has expressed it this way (McDonald and Meek 2016):

In my own opinion, another challenge is that the fluent speakers left in the community do not see this as their “problem”. It remains, “someone else” who should “fix” this, or take on the task of passing on language. In addition, when I have spoken about our language dying, I am met with comments refuting that and with anger that I should even suggest it. Speakers will say, “My grand-daughter responded to me in Kaska the other day.” The response they are referring to is typically very few words and perhaps short phrases. I have had elders tell me their children can speak fluently, and the reality is that they understand everything, but only speak a few phrases themselves. This strange way of avoiding dealing with the problem, or even talking about it, is baffling and frustrating to me. Everyone speaks of the vital importance of keeping Kaska alive, and yet no one is doing anything about it. This is our version of an “elephant in the living room” which no one acknowledges. As a learner and teacher, this is a very frustrating place to be. Knowing the 11^th hour we are in, as more fluent speakers die every year and to be working pretty much alone, is a sad and lonely feeling.

As McDonald points out, people recognize loss and risk in different ways, even within the same communities. Some people hear fluency; others hear vestiges of an aboriginal language. As a high school Kaska language instructor, McDonald occupies a vantage point that few others share: her job is to listen to and evaluate the linguistic practices of her teenage students. She hears the Kaska language shifting out of use, and she witnesses the corresponding risks her students take as they struggle to value knowing Kaska and knowing how to be Kaska. This risk doesn’t only manifest in the classroom; it becomes pronounced when older, more competent Kaska speakers police younger generations’ use of the language. McDonald calls these exchanges “language bullying;” those who respond to more novice speakers’ utterances with statements such as “I don’t understand you,” “What language are you speaking?” and “That’s not how you say that” are language bullies (McDonald 2019: 40-1). Through such exchanges, one generation’s experience of risk gets transferred onto the next generation. In the assessment of risk, the differences in perception highlight the critical importance of social roles and interaction—action on-the-ground in daily practice—for determining what risks are influencing language shift and how, and, more generally, how language shift is unfolding.

The primary concern for the Kaska language community remains the disappearance of knowledge, a change affected most saliently by a history of insecurities and a legacy of pain. In contrast, the bureaucratic concern—articulated in expert rhetoric—focuses on numbers of speakers and remaining indigenous languages. While both discourses emphasize an insecurity pertaining to loss, the consequences of complete loss (linguistic annihilation) are graver and discursively more striking for the First Nations than for the government, non-First Nations citizens, or even the academy. Being at risk in the Yukon pertains not only to the well-being of aboriginal languages, but also to the health and well-being of aboriginal people (cf. Hallett et. al. 2007).

Addressing loss: The TRC and Aboriginal (linguistic) wellbeing

“[T]he first and most crucial challenge to overcoming structural injustice…is the challenge of distinguishing between reforms that advance structural justice and those that, however subtly, entrench injustice. This challenge is a basic feature of most struggles against colonial injustice.”

(Eisenberg 2018: 28)

In recent years, the Government of Canada has begun to make reparations for the structural injustices related to residential school abuses through the implementation of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. As the quote above indicates, this is no simple task. Then-prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology on June 11, 2008, noting that “[the] objectives [of residential schooling] were based on the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was infamously said, ‘to kill the Indian in the child.’ Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.”⁶ While Yukon First Nations citizens recognize this statement as an attempt to redress past wrongs, in actual practice the accompanying financial compensation continues to cause great harm. Communities watch as the abused victims of the residential era are divested of the monetary compensation in ways that compromise their health. In some cases, this has resulted in the loss of life.

The Canadian federal government’s move to advance “structural justice” beyond the substantial financial award distributed to residential school survivors resulted in the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), the most “victim centric” of truth commissions (Niezen 2016: 921). As Ronald Niezen has discussed, because this TRC had no judicial power, its focus was largely centered on “the affirmation of victim experience and [the shaping of] testimony through a preferred kind of narrative” (2016:924). Its victim-centric-ness simultaneously extended to and delimited the kinds of narratives that were sanctioned as part of people’s testimonies, the ideal narrative being those recounting the most horrific, dehumanizing, and violent forms of abuse. Such narratives are not exclusive to the TRC’s public hearings; 21^st century politics surrounding First Nations issues in Canada has largely attributed contemporary social and health problems in First Nations communities to the abuses suffered then. Shocking statistics portraying the disappearance of aboriginal women, drug and alcohol abuse on reserves, low graduation rates of First Nations teenagers, and youth suicide rates in First Nations communities all find connections to the residential school era and historical trauma (see also Gone 2013; on the negative impact of representation on Native Americans, see Fryberg and Eason 2017; Eason et. al. 2018).

In 1998, Michael J. Chandler and Christopher Lalonde published a striking report that examined aboriginal “continuity” in relation to suicide. Their study aimed to determine the kinds of practices related to cultural continuity that were beneficial to community resilience and wellbeing. They found that First Nations communities that were engaged in efforts to revitalize and protect their aboriginal heritage through self-governance, land claims, control over administration of band services, and cultural facilities and events had significantly lower youth suicide rates (1998). The insecurities and feelings of being “at risk” triggered by non-Native contexts were seemingly counterbalanced by situations where First Nations communities had more control over their lives and more participation in cultural practices and the production of indigenous knowledge, resulting in happier and healthier communities.

Chandler and Lalonde’s 2007 publication with Darcy Hallett built on this initial research by adding aboriginal language as a factor that might impact youth wellbeing. Their results show that “indigenous language use, as a marker of cultural persistence, is a strong predictor of health and wellbeing in Canada’s Aboriginal communities” (Hallett et. al. 2007:398).⁷ Even more dramatically, their data show that aboriginal language use makes a difference in communities that have only one to four other cultural factors. When an aboriginal language was present, there were no youth suicides. This suggests that aboriginal languages – the speaking and learning of an aboriginal language – might be critical to the process of recovery for First Nations.

In McDonald’s research on Native language conversations as language reclamation, she shows how seemingly small steps have positive outcomes for First Nations communities (McDonald 2019). Working within her own community, she organized sixteen one-hour sessions for Kaska and non-Kaska community members to learn and converse in the Kaska language. Crucially, none of the participants were Elder Kaska language experts, with one exception: an Elder session assistant who advised McDonald on language themes and phrases and conducted the opening prayer for each conversation session. Of the Kaska participants, some were from the “silenced” generation—individuals who understood the language but were too traumatized by their residential school experiences to speak Kaska. The rest of the participants were L2 learners. McDonald found that one of the most important features of these Kaska conversation sessions was the feeling of safety and comfort, observing that “[p]eople felt safe making mistakes with pronunciation and due to the fact that everyone was learning, no one felt inhibited by their mistakes or limited knowledge” (McDonald 2019:45). Accompanying this inclusivity, the participants also noted the importance of being able to experience the language in their own way, whether through in-person sessions, language apps, or a combination of materials and interaction (2019: 46). Overall, she found that these conversation sessions improved participants’ self-confidence in speaking and “created healing on many levels” (2019:53).

While the continued use of aboriginal languages might be key to restoring community health, the recent process of reconciliation as carried out by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee of Canada has minimized the role of aboriginal languages in its “Calls to Action” statement. Of the 94 “calls,” the importance of aboriginal languages appears in six of them, most of which are under the heading “Language and Culture” (TRCC 2015:2). The “Calls” echo many of the mandates that the Yukon First Nations negotiated in the 1980s and 1990s when they established their own unique official Languages Act (#14 of the “Calls”) and funding to support language revitalization efforts (#14iii of the “Calls”). Additionally, the “Calls” pertaining to language include the protection of aboriginal languages in the classroom and for college credit, including the creation of “college degree and diploma programs” (TRC 2015:2) and the appointment of an Aboriginal Languages Commissioner. While each of these “Calls” programmatically recognizes the centrality of aboriginal languages in First Nations communities, they are not—nor can they— be the steps necessary to shift aboriginal languages and First Nations peoples from being “at risk” to “not at risk.” The trauma of the breech between then and now, compounded by decades of residential schooling, requires far more than 94 “calls to action” in order to be sufficiently redressed. Moving past monologic institutionalized testimonies, the road to recovery needs to happen in “action” á la Giddens and Goffman: dialogically in interaction. Or as McCarty et. al. have elaborated (2018:160), recovery through language is about “voice, which encapsulates personal and communal agency.” By using the language together—in dialogue with each other, regardless of grammatical structure—healing can happen.

Discussion: The Value of an “At Risk” Language, or the commodification of loss

In non-Aboriginal spheres, value is often determined in relation to two measures: scarcity and purity (cf. Hill 2002; Coupland 2003). An ideal(ized) endangered language is both rare (fewest numbers of speakers) and structurally untouched by dominant languages and non-indigenous words; its high value is reflected in the funds and resources committed to its preservation in archival-quality texts and recordings. Theorists such as Bourdieu raise our scholarly awareness of the intricacies of the linguistic marketplace, where linguistic values get assessed largely in service to state institutions and dominant discourses that now privilege neo-liberal, late modern capitalist agendas where the road to being successful is paved with the good intentions of those in power with resources to encumber in service of their own moral projects and personal welfare (cf. Ochs 2018). Within the language endangerment literature, scholars such as Robert Moore critically examine the emerging marketplaces that define and finance languages “at risk” of disappearing. In his article, Disappearing Inc. (2006), Moore considers the “politics of access” encompassing American Indian languages and their entextualization, emphasizing that “writing –its presence or its absence—is what makes all the difference” in the discourse of language endangerment. That is, the categorization of the status of an indigenous language depends on whether or not it was ever written down, distinguishing between a “dying” or “dead” language and a “(forever) lost” language. More generally, he shows how the rhetorical framing projects of language endangerment and revitalization simultaneously lament and admire these endangered languages (analogous to the rhetoric of a declining American landscape and more recently, declining biodiversity) or perform a kind of magical mimesis of/through inscription from the past into the future. However, this linguistic future is an archived and entextualized, committed to projects of grammatical excavation rather than oral performance (or plain old speaking).

Linguist Michael Walsh also details some of the academic discourse surrounding institutionalized projects of language endangerment. Like Moore, he sketches a similar conceptual dichotomy between langue and parole, which becomes apparent in contestations over the rhetoric used to describe situations of language shift and loss and the oddly polar positions of “revitalizing” and “documenting.” Some linguists value the writing (entextualization) of the “most endangered” language over that of language revitalization (Walsh 2005:302; note also, Moore’s memorialization 2006:298), positioning themselves as observers and recorders of a language or language variety, as opposed to a participant and user of the language (Shulist 2013). Linguists in the revitalization camp value local transformations, collaborating with indigenous groups to develop competencies and uses for an “endangered” language (Moore’s regenerativity 2006:298, or Leonard’s “decolonisation” (2017, 2018), or sociolinguistic “survivance” á la Davis 2017, Nevins 2013, Shulist 2016), if not entirely new linguistic varieties (Goodfellow 2003, Meakins 2012, O’Shannessy 2012). They also often assume a more overtly community-aligned political and moral position. In a more recent paper, Walsh and Zuckermann propose “revival linguistics” as a new field of linguistics, which attempts to identify universal constraints impacting all linguistic revitalization/ regeneration/revival endeavors, beginning with Hebrew (Walsh 2011). In their conclusion, they reflect on the value of language revitalization, both for Aboriginal communities and for governments:

Through this and other experiences we became convinced that a small investment in language revitalization could yield very significant dividends. Language revival can result in the saving of vast amounts of money and resources going into housing, social services and health intervention to little effect. A small investment into language revitalization can make an enormous difference to society. Public health can benefit from language intervention.

(Zuckermann and Walsh 2011:122)

As Hallett and colleagues revealed, this is not merely speculation, but a reality born out within First Nations communities in Canada. The costs and benefits of an investment in Aboriginal language revival does not only impact the status of the language itself, but people as well: the individual, Aboriginal communities, and ultimately the dominant nation-state.

Michael Silverstein similarly reflected on the role of linguists in the constitution and evaluation of linguistic transformation, pointing out that

of course, the way in which a group actually constitutes its cultural modes of allegiance to particular denotational norms may or may not be the same as these traditionally functionalist scholarly assumptions.

(Silverstein 1998:405)

Here Silverstein highlights the difference between community priorities and academic interests. As Vine Deloria long ago demanded, the interests of the Academy must attend to the interests and norms of the communities with whom it works (cf. Kroskrity and Meek 2017). If the research isn’t relevant to the group or subgroup, it’s worthless. The integration of different institutional and social norms of evaluation—and the evaluations themselves—must vary in relation to different modalities of encounter (to use Robert Moore’s phrase following Silverstein; 2006:296). That is, the accommodation must err on the side of benefitting Indigenous peoples the most. As Silverstein continues,

These will determine how the denotational norm is informed by specific genres, voicings, registers, and indexicalities interdiscursively licensed by such contexts, so as to orient people’s senses of good vs bad usage and the limits thereto over a population of even part-time and perhaps only partly knowledgeable users of forms encompassed under it.

(Silverstein 1998:405-406)

It is the orientation of “people’s sense of good vs bad” usage, skill, or linguistic knowledge that assigns value. Privileging Aboriginal communities’ “sense of good vs. bad” provides an opportunity to assess the value of an Aboriginal language according to the terms defined by the people most impacted by the language’s loss and restoration (Boltokova 2017; Davis 2016; Shulist 2016). Rather than participating primarily in the top-down discourses of institutional recognition (though they serve an important function), it is imperative that institutions and academics participate in practices and strategies that promote community health and well-being over the academic fears of risk and loss.

Conclusion

“[P]art of any solution to these [forms of colonizing and assimilatory] injustices must go beyond a focus on language to include questioning and contesting such power relationships from the ground up.” (De Korne and Leonard 2017:6)

As this article has argued, risk and loss play out differently within and across Indigenous communities. The generation emblematized as the generation of “loss” in the Yukon Territory experienced a shift in language that impacted personal well-being and community health. At risk were the individuals who were not learning how to be Dene (Kaska); at risk was their aboriginal identity that was most crucially developed through knowing Denezāgi (Kaska language); at risk was the community itself through the unhealthy actions of its members. Finally, at risk for this particular First Nation was a loss of land. As a First Nation, they participated in the land claims negotiations that resulted from the Umbrella Final Agreement in the early 1990s. They eventually came to view these negotiations as an attempt by the federal and territorial governments to gain access to and to relieve them of their entitlements to the land in which the First Nation was invested. Whether or not the state would divest them of their property, the Kaska First Nations interpreted these negotiations as another hostile attempt by the state to dissolve the state’s responsibility toward First Nations peoples through the dissolution of their land base and indirectly their status as Indians. Some First Nations individuals remarked that this move to settle land claims in the Yukon was a modern-day version of the United States’ policies to “liberate” American Indians by “allotting” land titles to individuals rather than tribes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Finally, at risk were and are the histories of Kaska individuals and the communities themselves. With each death, a part of their legacy disappears. It is through aboriginal language that this legacy can have a future.

These “at risk” discourses and the status of aboriginal languages as “endangered” underscore the enduring insecurities that undergird relationships between First Nations and the Canadian government. On the one hand, the enduring risk is tied to self-governance and the right to self-determination. This holds true for both the federal and First Nations governments. They are invested in each other and in the land in ways that the loss of either investment would negatively affect the other. Risk in terms of well-being is similarly shared, though under-recognized. To put this in context, the investment and risk for First Nations’ communities—loss of language, loss of knowledge, loss of well-being— is strikingly different from the investment and risk of an outside researcher whose professional trajectory might change (or a federal government whose political agenda may diverge), but whose investment endures. While the Canadian government has recognized its need to commit to First Nations and invest more resources in them, any positive impact will need to be realized on-the-ground and in dialogue with each First Nation, as underscored in the quote from De Korne and Leonard. Academic research is a call-to-action grounded in interpersonal exchange and attentiveness toward diverse perspectives on the experiences of trauma, loss, risk, and reclamation that pervade Indigenous communities. Nevertheless, while a concern for varying points of view and dialogue can begin to build a foundation for “transformation,” they are not sufficient. In an era of aboriginal self-governance and multilingualism, Indigenous language initiatives may be one of the best ways to attenuate risk, overcome a legacy of insecurity and trauma, and find resolution in difference. As McDonald’s conversation sessions revealed, aboriginal language learning is not merely an effort toward language recovery, but an effective path toward healing and Indigenous self-determination. Aboriginal languages and their revitalization just might be the road to recovery we are all seeking.