“It’s said that people revitalize a language, but really, it’s a language that revitalizes a people.” 

Professor Ryan DeCaire

Out of more than 70 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, only a handful still have a stable population of fluent speakers. Efforts to create new speakers of these languages, a process known as “language revitalization,” is an increasingly urgent priority. The importance of language revitalization is highlighted in the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, as well as in Article 13 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

Professor Ryan DeCaire, a second-language speaker of Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) who works with language revitalization efforts, talks about his language reclamation journey, why parents are the key to Indigenous language revitalization, how learning language requires “leaving your ego at the door,” and the need for non-Indigenous settlers to have some knowledge of local Indigenous languages. 

Srikanth: Could you talk a little about your journey to becoming a second-language speaker of Kanien’kéha as an adult and what your motivations were? 

DeCaire: Thanks for asking me that. I’d say it’s not really that unique amongst Indigenous people or second-language learners who became “speakers”, as what it really required of me was to start learning as an adult. I didn’t really start learning until I was about 20 years old. Where I grew up in Wáhta, which is really similar to other Mohawk communities, you do hear [the language] around, you see it on signs, you hear old people speaking it here and there, you pick up things like “hello” and “goodbye” and “one two three four”, other things that seem to stick out. But you never really develop this capacity to create with language and live in the language as a bilingual person. So I suppose when I was about 20, I only saw speakers that were in their 60s, 70s, and I just questioned why it was that way. It wasn’t necessarily a moral calling or anything like that. It wasn’t like I all of a sudden felt this great desire to change things — although I was motivated to change in the community. It just felt like something I had to do, and it wasn’t until later where I started to realize how important language was to our community, and how important to individuals too.  

So anyway, to make a long story short, I started learning as a 20-year-old. I started visiting elders in my community, recording them, and I didn’t understand anything they said at all, but I just tried to do as much as I could. There wasn’t anything available in my community for language learning, especially for adults. So I ended up moving away to another Mohawk community which is where I am now, at Six Nations. Six Nations is one of the leaders in adult language learning and acquisition of an Indigenous language not only in Canada but throughout the world. [They] developed an adult immersion program called Onkwawén:na Kentyóhkwa. I took the program there and I was there for about 2 years. I became a pretty good speaker after that because it’s a program that’s basically all immersion: Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 3:30 a day, up to 2000 hours accumulated over two years.  

After that, I moved away from Six Nations and I lived with first-language speakers in another Mohawk community called Kahnawà:ke. I lived my whole life from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed in the language, and I got away from English and taught the language in another immersion program in Kahnà:wake.  

Since then, that’s what I’ve been doing: spending time with elders, doing documentation work, teaching at the university, and also teaching in the community in adult immersion in Six Nations. Now I’m a curriculum developer there. I also teach in their second-year program, and of course, as a professor at U of T.  

But both of those jobs are a little different. In the community, it’s more about a specific goal of creating speakers; those adults can then have the capacity to restore intergenerational transmission by having children and creating first language speakers out of their children, or by becoming teachers in our elementary immersion schools. Whereas my job at U of T is two things: one is just talking about the nature of language revitalization, the other is teaching Mohawk, and that’s more about this idea of creating good neighbours. We need to create a general understanding of Indigenous languages, especially [for] students getting an Indigenous Studies degree. Whether you’re going to become a nurse or a lawyer, a farmer, an athlete, it doesn’t matter what you’re going to be; if you have knowledge of Indigenous languages within your local area, it’s going to enable you to do that job better than if you hadn’t.  

People say, “Why should a Canadian learn an Indigenous language?” If you want to “reconcile” the past wrongs, we have to realize that the Canadian identity is built on a relationship with Indigenous people. Maybe you won’t become fluent in these languages, or maybe you won’t feel like you have a direct impact, but just having knowledge of it, and understanding that knowing some Mohawk is part of what it means to be Canadian, is certainly going to be a step forward in making things easier with revitalization and policy changes.  

Srikanth: Do you think it’s important to centre discussions around language revitalization in the context of colonialism (i.e. in explaining why languages need to be revitalized in the first place)? 

DeCaire: I don’t really think the focus should be on colonialism; I think that distracts us and keeps us down the road of thinking about us as dispossessed people and challenged people. I think the focus should be more on transformation and saying that there is still this opportunity for us to revitalize these languages. We don’t want to be colonized people, we don’t want that to be our identity; we want our identity to be Kanien’kehá:ka, separate from what happened to us, or what was done to us years ago, or what is still happening to us today.  

The focus should be less on resisting and more on transforming our people to be resilient in an ever-changing world, and one way to do that is to focus on language revitalization. There’s research out there showing that when you learn your language, that’s an indicator of cultural continuity, and when you understand your culture, you’re more likely to feel part of a community; you’re more likely to feel like you have responsibilities in the world and you’re less likely to have mental health issues. We need more language practitioners and fewer social workers. [The thought is] that people revitalize a language, but really, it’s a language that revitalizes a people.  

When you engage in language revitalization, it’s less about putting bandages on a problem and more trying to get to the foundations of why we’re challenged.  

At the end of the day what really brings us all together is our language, and that’s an indicator of us as a separate identity as Indigenous people connected to this land base. When you lose words, you lose the language, you lose a collective understanding of how to live within the cycles of this current land base that we exist on. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so focused on language revitalization. It’s great to be part of a community that speaks your language; it’s so beautiful. It helps you to understand the worldview of your people right now and how it always has been. It also leads us to better social outcomes: people staying in the community, working in the community, and keeping jobs at home.  

Srikanth: Do you have any advice for people who want to learn their language?  

DeCaire: The best way is to not do it alone at the beginning. Language revitalization and language learning isn’t an individual affair; it’s a constant journey of humility where you’re leaving your ego at the door. It’s especially hard for Indigenous people in a class like the Mohawk language course at U of T. Certain years I’ve taught if you’re Mohawk, you’re less likely to do well in the class. The reason is usually that for Indigenous people learning their language, they bring to the classroom emotional and psychological baggage of feeling like they should know the language already. They grapple with the challenge of, “I have to admit that I don’t know my language in front of a collection of students who aren’t Mohawk.” It’s really hard to admit that you don’t know it; that’s one of the biggest challenges you have to overcome as an Indigenous person who wants to learn the language.  

You have to make time for learning the language; it’s not something that can just be done every now and again. That doesn’t mean you have to change your whole lifestyle and do everything exactly as I did to become a speaker and teacher; maybe you don’t have that opportunity like I did. Just ensure that it’s consistent studying and you’re actually involved with other people who are trying to speak it as well so you don’t feel alone. Because even though I say learning your Indigenous language is good for your mental health, sometimes it can have the opposite effect where you feel ostracized from society, that you’re alone. You could easily fall into that, so you have to ensure you’re with other people to help each other along in the process of learning the language. Recognize that it’s a long process, that even most people who become really good speakers are still learning the language, and it’s never going to end.  

Srikanth: What needs to be implemented structurally to ensure that there is a process of creating new speakers? 

DeCaire: What often happens is that, at times, language revitalization is superficial, or there’s not enough required effort put towards it in order to revitalize the language. [For instance,] it might be nice to have signs of Anishinaabemowin or Mohawk in Toronto because they’re a step forward in increasing knowledge and awareness about these languages. But if your goal is to revitalize a language, then you have to ask, what is a revitalized language? Usually, it requires two things: you have to have intergenerational transmission, and people have to actually speak it in a speech community. So if the goal is to recreate that, it doesn’t really matter how many signs you have. If people aren’t speaking it and passing it on to their children, then you’re not reaching your goal.  

Whether it be the macro level at the Canadian government level or micro level on reserve communities, there’s not enough adequate funding put towards language revitalization. So if the goal is [to develop proficient speakers], then more of the money and focus and efforts need to go towards things like immersion programs. 

Srikanth: It’s clear that apps can’t create speakers on their own, but do you think there’s a space for digital solutions in the language revitalization process? 

DeCaire: If it’s actually effective, of course. Some of these things might seem that way, but they’re not. Oftentimes, the resources we have at the community level are so small that maybe it’s not the best practice to do certain things at this moment.  

Often when people are engaging in language revitalization strategies, they’re taking almost a one-size-fits-all approach; when in actuality, every language has different vitality, different ideologies in the community about the importance of the language, it has different funding available, and it exists within a different sociocultural experience.  

Then the other question is, does the community have the capacity or the expertise to maintain such technologies? For example, we just developed a dictionary called Kawennón:nis with the National Research Council Canada with the expertise of computational linguists. But once they’re gone, who will have the capacity to maintain the code and update it? If we don’t have the funding, who’s going to be able to do that? Whose intellectual property is it?   

Srikanth: I can see why the one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work so well when working with languages of different vitalities. 

DeCaire: There are a lot of communities where only people over 60 years-old speak the language, so that’s indicative of the fact that they all stopped speaking around the 1950s and 1940s, and that was the last peer group of speakers. That usually means that there was a higher incidence of attendance at residential schools and other social pressures at that time.  

People think that the language is held by the elders, and then others will say “No, it’s the children because they’re the future.” Well, really, what I would say is that it’s the parents. Because it’s parents that get their children to speak. So if the parents aren’t highly proficient in the language, and their children go to an immersion school, it’s going to become a school language for the kids, and when they come home it’s not going to be a language of the family, it’s not going to be a language of the community.  

We should want to identify as people who use the language on an everyday basis. One indicator that your language isn’t doing well, [is] if it’s only being used as symbolic functions, like a sermon or a speech or a ceremony, and it’s not being used to tell your kid to wash their hands better or to flush the toilet. Those are the real words you need to know. Those are indicative of a healthy language, not the special, fancy words in a speech.  

Srikanth: Where do you think the vitality of Kanien’kéha will be in the next few years?  

DeCaire: It’s hard to say, but what really has to happen is more second-language speakers need to be creating more first-language speakers. 

Then the next goal would be to maintain a peer group of speakers. The biggest peer group, and most challenging, are pre-teens. When they start to become part of a more globalized world [with] people speaking English more often, it’s not really the cool thing to [speak the language]. So that’s the challenge there: how does the language stay cool, and how do people maintain it within their peer groups? The more speakers we get and encourage to stay within the community, to work in the community, and be part of that community of speakers, the better.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Ryan DeCaire is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Studies and in the Department of Linguistics. He is Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from Wáhta Mohawk Territory.