Indigenous Language Revitalization: How Education Can Help Reclaim “Sleeping” Languages

Abstract

On June 7, 2021, The New York Times (NYT) reported the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada (Austen, 2021). News of this mass murder and its subsequent cover up rocked the world and came at a time when Canada and many other countries have mounted reconciliation efforts as they attempt to come to terms with a brutal past involving Indigenous populations. The residential school context described in the NYT story is representative of residential school educational arrangements in the last century that saw children from numerous First Nations forcibly removed from their homes and forbidden to speak their languages for generations (McIvor, 2020). By detaching these children from language, culture, and place, stateand church-sponsored schooling sought to train Indigenous students for subservience. Sadly, these cruel efforts inflicted unimaginable harm—both epistemological and emotional— upon these children (McCarty et al., this issue). In fact, Geraldine Bob, a former student, featured in the NYT story disclosed that the school staff members “would just start beating you and lose control and hurl you against the wall, throw you on the floor, kick you, punch you” (Austen, 2021). Such abuse, as we learn, was not uncommon. In starting my commentary with this disturbing anecdote, my goal is to highlight how Indigenous people have been forcibly removed from their land, displaced, and subsequently had their rights revoked and identities rejected (McKinley & Smith, 2019). That their lives are inextricably intertwined with the land is further underscored by Chiblow and Meighan (2021, in press). More importantly, however, as the four papers in this special issue demonstrate, vestiges of coloniality—often mediated through language-in-education policies and practices—have had a lasting impact on disenfranchised Indigenous people. And ultimately what’s at stake is a politics of identity (mis)recognition. Before I proceed any further, I would like to acknowledge that to some extent I am complicit in the settler colonialism that I write about. I want to acknowledge the land upon which my university, Michigan State University (MSU) resides. MSU occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg, namely, the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. But I am also originally from Singapore, a small country in Southeast Asia that was previously inhabited by the Indigenous people (i.e., the bumiputeras, or “Sons of the Soil”) of the region. Over the centuries, however, this region was overrun by colonizers from Portugal (the 15 century), the Netherlands (17 century) and Britain (19 century), all of whom plundered the wealth of and in Southeast Asia. But I am also a product of colonialism, having grown up in a postcolonial Singapore whose government preserved many policy practices (e.g., the implementation of English as a medium of instruction in public schools) that it inherited from the British, and having been raised Catholic within a family of Portuguese heritage. I mention my own history in order to underscore how the apparatuses of church and school have historically and universally played pivotal roles in advancing the colonial enterprise; the lasting influence of church and school also echoes through the papers in this special issue.