Donna Patrick

Language Endangerment, Language Rights and Indigeneity

Bilingualism, and the ideologies associated with it, are closely tied to social, political and economic circumstances. This is both because the linguistic practices that characterize bilingualism arise out of particular social conditions, which lead people to interact in particular ways in order to live together, and because bilingual practices in turn shape new social identities and new ways of interacting socially, culturally, politically and economically. This understanding of bilingualism can shed light not only on such well-studied cases as that of French-English bilinguals in Canada or Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in Spain, but also on the lesser-known cases that are the subject of this chapter: those involving Indigenous groups around the world. These groups speak both their ‘traditional’ language and a ‘dominant’ language, associated with a current or former colonizing power. This chapter will provide an analysis of this form of bilingualism, which has arisen in situations of language contact between Indigenous and larger colonizing or dominant languages.

Indigenous languages and the racial hierarchisation of language policy in Canada

This paper addresses language policy and policy-making in Canada as forms of discourse produced and reproduced within systems of power and racial hierarchies. The analysis of indigenous language policy to be addressed here focuses on the historical, political and legal processes stemming from the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–1969) to the 1982 Canadian Constitution and its aftermath. Through a critical historical and discursive analysis, we demonstrate how racial hierarchies and language ideologies favoured French and English dominance and reinforced the marginalisation of indigenous groups defined in terms of the socially constructed and assigned category of race. We relate these race-based language policies to contemporary indigenous language struggles in Canada, including the Task Force Report on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures (2005), and describe the logic imposed by colonial constitutional arrangements on indigenous language promotion, revitalisation and mobilisation in Canada.

Objects and language in trans-contextual communication

In their recent book titled How Matter Matters, Carlile et al. (2013) cite Barad (2003, 801) who lamented that: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in...

Talk around objects: designing trajectories of belonging in an urban Inuit community

In this study, we present findings from a collaborative ethnographic study with urban Inuit in Ottawa, Canada. We investigate “talk around objects” as a meaningful learning activity and a prism of human-object relationships. Focusing on Inuit clothing – namely the Inuit-made parka (winter coat) and amauti (a traditional Inuit baby carrier) – we examine the impact of everyday objects on social interaction, with a particular emphasis on the effects of materiality on talk. More specifically, we explore the role of objects and object design in mobilizing particular forms of narratives, which project meaning across contexts of time, space, activity, and generations. Accordingly, we conceptualize the impact of objects as “joins” in trans-contextual meaning-making and point to their significance in Inuit learning and in serving to shape human-object relationships. We see the contribution of this article to this special issue as twofold. Not only does it explore “talk around objects” as an instance of co-agency, in which humans and objects contribute jointly to the shaping of talk; but it also emphasizes the role of objects as “joins”, enabling and sustaining the connection of people with each other and with the environment, within and across contexts. Such a perspective relates to post-human theory, which considers the agency of things in social interaction, while acknowledging an Inuit worldview, which rejects anthropocentrism.

“Urban-Rural” Dynamics and Indigenous Urbanization: The Case of Inuit Language Use in Ottawa

The establishment of cities in Canada has played a pivotal role in the displacement, dispossession, and marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Yet, more than half of the Indigenous population now resides in cities, and urbanization continues to increase. This paper addresses a specific aspect of Inuit mobility—namely, migration and the dynamic use of Inuit language and knowledge in the city of Ottawa. Drawing on community-based participatory research in collaboration with an Ottawa Inuit literacy centre, we investigate a range of Inuit-led educational practices that emerged from collaborative work with a group of Inuit women. Suggested activities drew on semiotic resources—including objects and language—that involved retracing the migrational trajectories of Inuit between cities and between nonurban communities, particularly those in their Arctic “homelands.” Such practices appear to cut across the “urban-rural divide,” particularly since cities were rarely mentioned, a fact that seems to signal the irrelevance of this dichotomy for urban Inuit. In this context, the exploration of artifactual literacies—more specifically, speaker interactions that unfold around culturally meaningful objects—led to the following conclusions: (1) multilingual oracy is key to complex transcontextual meaning making; (2) spatiotemporal reference is anchored both in individual experience and in connectivity with members of a newly constituted community; and (3) there is a sharing of cross-generational horizontal knowledge, which includes the abstention from any enforcement of a linguistic norm.

ENGLISH AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ABORIGINAL IDENTITIES IN THE EASTERN CANADIAN ARCTIC

One of the major preoccupations of Aboriginal educators and of a growing number of linguists is the plight of indigenous languages internationally. Given the consequences of colonization and globalization, many of the world’s minority languages appear to be threatened by the increasing use of English, French, Spanish, or other dominant languages within particular nations (Crystal 2000; Dorian 1989; Fishman 2001; Grenoble and Whaley 1998; Krauss 1992; Nettle and Romaine 2000). In Canada, where fifty or so aboriginal languages are still spoken, only four (Cree, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Inuktitut) are said to be “truly viable” (Kinkade 1991). A more optimistic estimate places this figure at seven, due largely to the language revitalization efforts that took hold in the 1990s. Whatever the actual number, Aboriginal language use in Canada has been rapidly decreasing, and many local community leaders and educators have become involved in language revitalization and maintenance initiatives specific to the circumstances of their communities.