Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England

Andrea Bear Nicholas

139 Andrea Bear Nicholas Dr. Andrea Bear Nicholas chairs the Native Studies Department at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, where she developed the first Native Language Immersion Teacher Training Program based in a North American university. Language revitalization is her current focus: she is working on a massive collection of Maliseet-language stories and is also piloting a three-year adult Maliseet language immersion program at St. Mary’s First Nation. Born and raised in New England, Dr. Nicholas is a member of the Tobique Community. She has published widely on Maliseet history, language, and culture. The following essay is excerpted and adapted from a piece she initially wrote for Briarpatch, an independent contemporary-issues magazine based in Saskatchewan. Linguicide, the Killing of Languages, and the Case for Immersion Education As defined by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, linguicide is “the killing of languages without killing the speakers.”⁴ For the most part, Canadians and Americans are probably aware that linguicide was a central and overt policy in residential and boarding schools in both countries. Indeed, the stories of First Nations children being routinely punished in these schools for speaking their language, sometimes even with needles stuck through their tongues, are legion. While it is assumed that linguicide died with the closure of the last residential school in 1996, it continues as a covert policy into the present. As Dr. Roland Chrisjohn has stated, “Residential schools . . . never ceased operation; they merely changed their clothes, and went back to work.”⁵ Though Indigenous children are no longer openly punished for speaking their languages, it is the power of dominant linguistic groups over Indigenous linguistic groups that continues to fuel linguicide by imposing a dominant language (English or French) on Indigenous children as the medium of instruction and by providing no option for education in the medium of the mother tongue.⁶ By this means Indigenous languages are effectively ignored, stigmatized, and replaced or displaced. In the opinion 140 maliseet of linguistic rights scholar Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, this form of education is “subtractive language education,” since it subtracts from a child’s linguistic repertoire instead of adding to it.⁷ What makes it especially effective is that it separates Indigenous children from proficient speakers of their language during most of every day and requires them to function exclusively in an imposed and alien language. Unfortunately, the core language programs in most schools for Indigenous children do not even begin to meet the challenge of maintaining or revitalizing Indigenous languages. Indeed, these programs are completely ineffective in creating fluency, even with the best of language teachers, since classes are most commonly only a few minutes a day while most of the rest of the day is conducted in the dominant language. So while teachers may never physically punish children or speak negatively about their students’ mother tongue, the imposition of a dominant language as the main medium of instruction sends a subtle message that the Indigenous language is neither useful nor important.⁸ Indeed, it is the subtlety of this message that makes it just as effective as outright punishment in destroying a language, if not more so. Subtractive language education is also accurately called “submersion education” insofar as it submerses Indigenous children in both an alien language and an alien culture and expects them to sink or swim.⁹ Too many end up sinking, and even among those who swim, they rarely achieve full proficiency in the dominant language primarily because they were never given the chance to become fully proficient in their mother tongue first. As explained by Dr. Jim Cummins of the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, the problem for Indigenous children forced to learn most subjects in the medium of a dominant language is that it generally takes about two years to become socially proficient in a second language but five years to become proficient enough to function well academically in a second language.¹⁰ As a result, educators unaware of this disparity tend to label Indigenous students early in their schooling as “learning disabled” or worse, and it is these students who eventually tend to be pushed out of school. With only about 50 percent of Indigenous children completing school in North America, it is clear that the promise of equal access to education for these children has not been fulfilled and that the chief, but Andrea Bear Nicholas 141 most addressable, cause is the imposition of a dominant language as the...