CBC Radio wrote:Ryan DeCaire didn't become fluent in Kanien'kéha, the language of his Mohawk ancestors, until he was in his 20s.
Now, he teaches it to students from all backgrounds at the University of Toronto in the hopes of keeping the language alive.
Growing up in Wáhta Kanien'kehá:ka Territory just east of Georgian Bay, Ont., DeCaire only knew a few Kanien'kéha words. He was always curious why conversations in the Mohawk language in his community never went beyond "hello" or "goodbye."
Eventually, DeCaire reached a realization that unless something was done to preserve the language, it would disappear... What was it like going through into an immersion setting for two years?
It was one of the most challenging things I've ever done. You know, I've done a BA, I've done an MA, and comparing that to my immersion time, immersion was much more challenging. We're in there for six and a half hours a day every day, for 1,000 hours, for the entire school year, culminating in 2,000 hours total. And it's a rule to only speak Mohawk.
So when you don't know anything, it's very, very challenging, and to admit to yourself that you don't know anything, so you feel stressed, you feel anxious. But eventually you realize the more you learn, it starts to become more comfortable, and then you kind of get over this mountain and you start to realize you're beginning to speak more fluidly. And at the same time, you're building a community of other younger speakers — and that's what I often tell people, is that's one of the things we really need that's most important: a community of people who are striving to the same thing.
I also found this quote interesting and informative
CBC Radio wrote:Now you're teaching the first-ever Kanien'kéha language class at the University of Toronto. It turns out most of your students are non-indigenous. Did that surprise you?
Coming into Toronto, I knew there would be a lot more people from diverse backgrounds. And I was OK with that because there's two reasons, in my opinion, I teach language. I teach immersion to community to create speakers, because we need to create speakers so we can restore intergenerational transmission.
But we need to work on language revitalization at many levels, and another way we need to do is we need to create what I call "good neighbours," and that's really helping young non-Indigenous people to understand the importance of language in Indigenous people's culture, ways of thinking, and also realize that one's Canadian identity or their Canadian identity is built in a relationship with Indigenous people.
And if you really want to understand what it means to be from Canada, you have to understand the Indigenous perspective. And there's no better way, in my opinion, than to learn a language.
Also, with Hawaii being in the news a lot lately, this came to me as well via twitter:
What the Hawaiian language revival means for conservation
Kehau Springer wrote:In Hawai‘i, we have a proverb that says “He aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauwā ke kanaka”: “The land is a chief, and man is its servant.” In our worldview, there is no separation between nature and people; just as the land takes care of us, we need to take care of the land.
This concept may seem simple, but years of cultural repression following the United States’ takeover of Hawai‘i jeopardized this connection — and we’re only now beginning to restore it. Much of this recovery is due to the resurgence of the Hawaiian language. ... I was born in 1982, only four years after Hawaiian became an official language in Hawaiʻi alongside English. I did not learn Hawaiian until I was 13 years old, and did not become fluent until college. Once I learned my mother tongue, many things began to reveal themselves to me. I was able to understand the meaning behind place names, which often describe characteristics of that landscape or the resources found there. ...As I began to understand Hawaiian place names, these connections became clearer, and it led me to think about how land and oceans were managed and cared for. This was only the beginning of my journey to seek out respected elders and practitioners who continued these traditions.
A language is more than verbs, vocabulary and grammar, it carries a people's culture.