Annual conference continues work on preserving, promoting languages
- Jeanelle Mandes | December 17, 2015
The main theme of the First Nations Language Keepers conference was the restoration of Indigenous languages and the effort of keeping it alive.
That is what Leo Gamble from Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation took away from attending the two day conference held at the Saskatoon Inn on November 25-26th.
“It’s important to have these conferences to keep our languages alive for our young people to have a chance to learn the language(s),” he says. “There’s people like me that had parents had spoken their language but chosen not to teach their children. And I’m one of them.”
Gamble is hopeful that not only him but other people will learn the language as he says “there’s a responsibility to each of us to keep the language alive.”
Delegates had the opportunity to attend a variety of sessions with various keynote speakers that stressed the importance of Indigenous languages. To accommodate the high number of participants, the conference was divided up in different sessions with different guest speakers such as Zoe Hopkins, Glenda Abbott, and Kevin Tacan to name a few.
Gamble’s memorable guest speaker where he took away valuable information about languages was with Chris Scribe.
“What he shared in his presentation was that if the government and the churches can use education to take away our languages away, now that we have the power to educate our own people, we can use education to get the language back. That’s the biggest thing [from the conference] that came to mind for me is that we can use the education system to restore the language,” he adds.
Dorothy Myo, the president of the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre (SICC), first organized the conference ten years ago and has kept it going on an annual basis to create more awareness on the seven Indigenous languages in Saskatchewan.
She says one of the goals of the event is for everyone to take in and exchange information with the delegates, presenters and keynote speakers who brought their own stories from their areas.
“We’re over 430 delegates this year so we’re kind of pushing it to the limits of capacity. [Every year] fluctuates around the 400 mark. Some of the participants and guest speakers travelled far as Yellowknife, Ontario, Alberta, South and North Dakota,” says Myo who is a fluent Cree speaker.
This is the only First Nations language conference in Canada which makes the event unique with an amazing turnout each year. The SICC president points out how the Indigenous languages are slowly depleting and the mandate of this conference will stress the awareness of revitalizing the languages.
“We have a huge loss of our language as First Nations people and it’s declining rapidly. Many of our languages are endangered of being extinct,” she says.
Myo says in Saskatchewan, the Nakota language have very few speakers who are master speakers and they’re all plus 60 years of age.
“There’s different ways and models of preserving languages and that’s what people are looking at,” she says. “We have to go to the young people and we can’t wait for them to come to us to teach them the languages. It’s not going to happen.”
Myo says many people attend the conference each year to find new information of learning the languages and to discover different methodologies that people are using .
“However small you want to start in terms of learning your language, there’s hope for us to revitalize . In order to carry forward our culture and do the ceremonies, we need to know the language. That’s where our identity comes from,” she adds.
“I’m sure there are people who would love to be fluent in their language but they just don’t know where or how to begin. They can find that out here.”