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Preserving Indigenous Knowledge
1-09-2017
In the last column, we examined the previously rich indigenous language diversity in Canada and the drastic decline in the number of fluent speakers along with some of the steps people are taking to preserve the more than 60 local Aboriginal languages of our country. But this leads to the questions: Why does it matter if a language goes extinct? Wouldn’t it be easier if we all spoke the same language anyways? In today’s modern world, why do we care about native languages that haven’t evolved? Shouldn’t they naturally be forgotten as we progress in society?
UBC Anthropologist Wade Davis has spent his life examining these questions. He claims “A language is not just vocabulary and grammar. It’s a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of a culture comes into the material world. When a language is no longer spoken among people, it is very difficult for that culture to keep alive its particular wisdom and way of life. Today nearly 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide but fully half of them are not being taught to children. Within a generation or two we're losing half of humanity's intellectual, social, and spiritual legacy.”
All over the world, including here in Canada, people are abandoning their ancestral tongue in favour of the dominate languages of the country. As they shun their language, they also strip themselves of their cultural birthright. Davis goes on to say, “Culture is not decoration or artifice. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to avoid madness, to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that history suggests lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings.”
Language and culture are intertwined. When we lose a language, we lose the unique way of thinking and interacting with the world. In our race for modernity, we have forgotten how to live in harmony with the earth and with each other – values that indigenous cultures have held sacred. When we lose access to knowledge, we lose a part of the collective wisdom of humanity. Davis borrows a metaphor from biology, “Imagine you are getting on an airplane, and you notice that the mechanic is popping out the rivets in the wings. You ask the obvious question and the mechanic says, "No problem. We save money with each rivet and so far we've had no problems." Perhaps the loss of a single rivet makes no difference, but eventually the wings fall off.” Linguists calculate that indigenous languages are being lose at the rate of one every four months. That’s a lot of missing rivets. Wade likens it to a waterfall of linguistic destruction unprecedented in history. He calls it an “enthocide” – the deliberate and sanctioned extermination of a people’s way of life. This extinction of local languages and cultures may have irreversible consequences that we can’t totally predict.
It’s not just society who will pay the price, individuals suffer too. Senator Sinclair Murray, head of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, explains, ““Who are you?” is not a rhetorical question. To be able to answer that, you need to know where you and your ancestors came from, what you stood for, your personal and collective history, what your influences have been, what your ambitions have been and are, and what your purpose in life is.” We construct our personal identity out of the building blocks of language and culture. When we are proud of our heritage, we have an inner strength that sustains us through challenges. But if your language and your culture are denigrated or denied, shame, tension, and confusion increase as you know longer know, or value, who you are.
Most readers speak a mother tongue other than English. The importance of upholding language, culture, identity, and religion is a constant focus of Muslim families and communities. We have many parallels with First Nations people who are trying to do the same thing for their children and youth. The fight to respect and preserve Canadian indigenous languages and cultures, so that we each understand who we are individually and collectively, is a shared responsibility of us all.
Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
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