Much talk, little action on language issues

SARA MINOGUE

Inuit languages are at a “crucial point” said Johnny Kusugak, the Official Languages Commissioner of Nunavut, as he presented his annual report to a committee of the Legislative Assembly last Thursday.

“We must act now.”

But Kusugak’s report showed little action from the languages commissioner in attaining that goal over the last year.

Kusugak, who joined the office last year at this time, said his priority is traveling to communities to hear community concerns.

A travel schedule for the upcoming fiscal year was accidentally included in the information package handed out to MLAs, and several MLAs questioned Kusugak’s goal of visiting communities in all three regions of Nunavut, and beyond.

Kusugak replied saying that he wants to understand language issues across the territory, and that, on a visit to Cambridge Bay last summer, “it was evident there are individuals out there who want to voice their issues.”

Nunavut’s languages commissioner has four main roles.

The first is a monitoring role. The language commissioner should make sure the Government of Nunavut is progressing on a new Language Act.

The office is working with the GN on the new Language Act, which began when the previous languages commissioner issued recommendations for the GN to work with.

The monitoring roles means the language commissioner is also responsible for making sure the GN will meet the goal, set out in Pinasuaqtavut, to make Inuktitut the working language of government by 2020.

But when Pangnirtung MLA Peter Kilabuk asked Kusugak how progress on this goal could be measured, Kusugak conceded that his office had not begun planning for this, and had not set any benchmarks by which to measure progress.

When Kilabuk suggested that Kusugak should start working on this, Kusugak agreed.

“That’s very sensible,” he told Kilabuk. “It’s about time we started dealing with this instead of just talking about it.”

A policy analyst with the languages office, Shauna-Leigh Wright, said monitoring progress on making Inuktitut the language of government should be the responsibility of an Inuit Language Authority – a body that the languages commissioner is recommending be created.

That recommendation falls under the languages office’s second role, which is to advise the government on language issues.

An Inuit Language Authority would be responsible for handling issues such as how dialects are recognized, and which dialects will be used in government.

Kusugak presented an academic study into dialect issues in Nunavut, in which an academic makes recommendations for preserving Inuit dialects.

That study was initiated under the previous languages commissioner.

The third role of the languages commissioner is to act as an ombudsman for language issues. That means that Nunavummiut can call the languages commissioner to complain if they are not getting government services in their first language.

But in the last year, the languages office has not investigated any complaints, because none of the complaints that came to the office fit the criteria for the types of complaints the office can investigate.

For example, many complaints were made relating to documents not translated into Inuktitut at hamlet offices, but the language commissioner has no jurisdiction over municipal governments.

The fourth role of the languages office is to promote the use of Inuktitut.

Public affairs officer Anna Zeigler said she is working on an annual languages initiatives newsletter that will list all of the languages initiatives going on in Nunavut, to help the many language projects and groups to avoid duplicating efforts.

She is also planning a storytelling event at the Alianait arts festival in Iqaluit in June, and plans to work with the CBC on a program about Inuit languages that could be broadcast across the north – though not this year, as funding for this project was denied.