New APTN series explores state of aboriginal languages

MONTREAL — Finding Our Talk, a new 13-part television series on the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network, promises to be an unsettling look at the precarious state of Canada’s aboriginal languages.

With only three of Canada’s 50 native languages — Cree, Objiway and Inuktitut — expected to survive the next century, the series’ producers wanted to see how different communities are trying to preserve their languages.

“‘What are we doing in our community?’ That’s the question I hope people begin to ask themselves,” says co-producer Paul M. Rickard, a Cree from Moose Factory, Ont.

The first episode looks at how the Mohawk language has survived in Kahnawake, which lies just across the St-Lawrence River from Montreal.

Language Among the Skywalkers shows how the legendary Mohawk ironworkers helped preserve their native language by using it as they worked. As teams of four men rivet steel beams high up on skyscrapers and bridges, they speak to each other continuously in Mohawk.

At the same time, they reinforce their own language competency, and on occasion ended up teaching Mohawk to their non-Mohawk co-workers.

Despite Kahnawake’s urban location and the growing pressure there to speak French and English, the community is still trying to hang on to its language by using Mohawk in real-life situations.

There’s Mohawk language instruction for adults, teenagers, and children. For adults who have lost their language, re-learning and using “one word a day” is the objective, while students at the Kahnawake Survival School, who can now take most of their courses in Mohawk, explore the deeper meanings of words in class. Preschoolers learn the language by being immersed in it.

Other episodes of Finding Our Talk look at Inuit, Cree, Algonquin, Innu and other aboriginal communities in Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

In the James Bay Cree communities of Waskaganish and Chisasibi, the program highlights their successful Cree language immersion program.

Another segment, filmed at Lac Simon, Que., called The Trees are Talking, shows how an Algonquin couple, George and Maggie Wabanonick, take a group of high school students into the woods to show them their traditional language and culture.

In Wendake, Que., and Midland, Ont., the film crew tells how the Huron language now survives primarily in hymns, religious texts, dictionaries and turn-of-the-century wax recordings — which means that Huron is now an extinct lanaguage

This episode, called A Silent Language looks at the historical roots of the Huron language’s demise, the present-day efforts to re-kindle it in spoken form, and its enduring cermonial importance.

The differences in how native communities deal with language issues amazed Rickard.

“In some communities, language is not even an issue,” Rickard said.

That’s because creating jobs and dealing with social problems, is often seen as more important than language preservation in many aboriginal communities.

In Maliotenam, an Innu community on Quebec’s Lower North Shore, Rickard says he found that the Montagnais language teacher saw students for only 20 minutes a day. She even didn’t have her own classroom, but had to push a cart from class to class.

“They were saying, ‘We don’t have the time, we have to have kids learn French, we want our kids to be prepared for the world,’” Rickard said.

When Rickard visited Iqaluit, he was impressed by how much Inuktitut he heard at the workplace. In Moose Factory, his home community, English is the language of work, while Cree is spoken only at home, and more often among older people than among youth.

Rickard says control over education, and the commitment by individuals to speak their native tongue seem to be the key to any language’s survival. Finding Our Talk tries to single out the places and people making a positive difference.

After watching the entire series, Rickard expects viewers to be better equipped to answer the question he’s often asked himself during the filming: “How are you going to do something about language?”

The series grew out of a pilot broadcast last year, called Finding My Talk in which Rickard began his own personal quest to understand the challenges facing Canada’s aboriginal languages.

Finding our Talk is produced by Mushkeg Productions, a new company which brings together Rickard and George Hargrave, whose previous productions include Broken Promises, Invasion of the Beer People and Welcome to Nunavut.

The new series’ first episode will be broadcast during the first week of February on APTN.