Prof Lorna Williams Defending (or Abandoning?) First Nations Language Education

If it were impossible to teach languages in the classroom, it would be unethical for universities to charge money (and offer degrees) for students to learn languages in the classroom.  Nobody makes such claims for languages like Chinese (that are certainly difficult to learn in the classroom) and yet this is offered as a very casual excuse for why educational programs in Canada's indigenous languages are failing --and it is offered as an excuse for why their failure shouldn't matter.

In an apparent riposte to my earlier article on my efforts to learn Cree, and mentioning my more recent lament that I'll have to throw my Cree books in the garbage, Lorna Williams wrote in to inform me that you can't learn a language in a classroom anyway.  Well, that certainly is a convenient justification to simply "give up" on a system of classroom education that is failing, while other languages are being successfully taught right down the hall (in the same universities, etc.).  Lorna Williams is not merely a professor, but also a "Canada Research Chair" (which means that she makes big decisions about how big sums of money get spent).  My reply follows her message, below.

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Eisel, I find your email distressing in that you make sweeping claims that
no one cares about or wants to learn Cree. It is true that one cannot
learn a language by taking a course, you need to be immersed in the
language for a period of time. I also cannot believe that there is no one
to give the books to, I know if you brought them to Dr. Jan van Eijk he
would be happy to redistribute them to other students who would benefit
from them. I hope you will find what you are looking for as you continue
on your travels. Lorna

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L.W.,

> Eisel, I find your email distressing…

It is distressing.  The situation at F.N.U. is distressing.  I'm
distressed.  If you've read my article about my experience at F.N.U.,
and you find it distressing, that's good: the article is intended to
raise difficult questions, that nobody inside the institution wants to
ask.  The president of the university, etc., have all seen the article
already.

> It is true that one cannot

> learn a language by taking a course…

That is not true:
• Nobody in the department of Japanese would make this excuse, claiming that it is impossible for the students to learn Japanese inside a classroom anyway, etc.
• Nobody in the department of Chinese would make this excuse, claiming that it is impossible for the students to learn [Chinese] inside a classroom anyway, etc.
• Even in the case of "dead languages", nobody in the department of Latin, Greek, etc. would make this excuse, claiming that it is impossible for the students to learn [Latin or Greek] inside a classroom anyway, etc.

In reality, it is much more difficult to learn languages like Chinese
than it is to learn Cree.  In many ways, it is more difficult to learn
dead languages than living languages (including even endangered,
living languages).

If the institutions want to provide language-instruction, they can.
None of these institutions lack the resources.  In Cambodia, Laos,
etc., I have seen institutions that lack the resources.  Here in
Canada, we have working electricity and chalkboards: aside from a few
people who really care (and want to get the job done) that's all you
really need.

> …you need to be immersed in the language for a period of time.

Well, there are language departments teaching Japanese that make
arrangements for their students to have some immersion in the
language: but nothing like that is possible for First Nations
languages here (despite the fact that it is much cheaper to take a bus
to Prince Albert than it is to take an airplane to Japan!).  I am well
aware of the benefits of language-immersion, and I discuss them in the
same article about learning Cree (I don't know if you read it in full
before replying) where I complain that institutions need to take a
more active role (even if it is just in organizing bus-trips!) so that
students will have more direct language exposure --because it is much
easier to meet people who speak Chinese than it is to meet people who
speak Cree in downtown Regina.

My short article, again, is here:
http://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.ca/2012/09/on-learning-cree-and-not-learning-cree.html

> …I know if you brought them to Dr. Jan van Eijk

(Image from "Rate my Professors")

I have met and spoken to Prof. Jan van Eijk many times, and he knows about every stage of my personal tragedy (in trying to learn Cree, etc.).  If you think he cares in the slightest, think again.  I begged for his help many times.  The only help that I received was one short e-mail, suggesting that I write to a certain professor at U.B.C., to ask if there was any hope there; I did receive a very useful reply from U.B.C., saying that their situation was even more hopeless (for language instruction) than F.N.U.

> I hope you will find what you are looking for as you continue
> on your travels.

I won't: my life and all my aspirations have been destroyed.  If I
can't learn Cree within Canada, I can't learn it anywhere.  I searched
this entire country for any possibility of learning Cree or Ojibwe
(from U.B.C. to Montreal) and I didn't find any viable option (on the
contrary, many of the replies I received were just as bleak as the one
I've mentioned from U.B.C.).

First Nations language education is in a situation worse than a
crisis.  Don't make excuses that nobody in their right mind would
offer for any other language: if it was impossible to teach a language
in a classroom, why is the classroom of such vital importance for
every other language on earth?  Why was classroom teaching of such
enormous importance to the revival of other endangered languages?

Yes, people do need classroom instruction in Cree: I'm one of them.  I
couldn't get it.  I'll never have the opportunity to study the
language again.  This is a personal tragedy for me --and it wasted two
years of my life.  That's how the story ends for me --[and] 99.9% of people
who have a similar disappointment will not be able to publish an
article about it (and won't have the nerve to complain directly to
people like Prof. Jan Van Eijk).

E.M.

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For the sake of contrast (and because this was mentioned, in passing, in the message above), here is the exceedingly polite response to the same article that I received from Vianne Timmons, President of the University of Regina.

V.T. on the C.B.C. (source).

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Eisel,
Thank you for your email.  I read you Blog with interest.  I will share your concerns with the President of First Nations University.  You raise so may issues that are important. Preserving the Cree language is important and I know that your insights will help in improving language instruction.
Thank you again for taking the time to write.
Dr. Timmons

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The photograph of President Timmons, above, was pulled from a C.B.C. article on the long-term scandal of how high the salaries are for university administrators.  I appreciate that she took the time to read my work and reply; however, I neither expect that she nor anyone else in power (and earning above $350,000 per year) is going to take on the challenge of fundamentally improving the situation for the study and preservation of Canada's indigenous and endangered languages.  Both the opportunity and the obligation to make a positive difference are unique to Canada: we can't expect London, Paris or Berlin to excel in the study of these languages.  Sadly, the leaders in the field will either be educated here, or else nowhere at all.

F.N.U., big lawn, big windows… bad language courses (Image = Wikipedia).

On Learning Cree (and Not Learning Cree)

There's nothing idealistic about the decision to learn a language, nor about the work that ensues thereafter.  There's nothing mysterious about rote memorization, nor the process of developing listening-comprehension and speaking ability.

Anyone can do it.  Compared to any of the hobbies that people devote hundreds of hours to, it is "easy", and relatively cheap.  If you compare it to a sport, there is very little "equipment", and very little strength, stamina, or even talent required.

The trouble is that it isn't a sport that you can practice entirely alone.  You do need a partner who can, at least, throw the ball back-and-forth with you.  Being around other beginners is better than nothing; interacting with fluent speakers is (of course) better still (assuming they have some patience for the mistakes you're bound to make, and some interest in correcting you).  However, being around them still isn't enough, for the same reason that hanging around a gym isn't enough: you do need at least one other person who will do the work with you.

Cree really is an endangered language.  Groceries are not labelled in the language; even inside First Nations University, you will never see a "no smoking" sign written in Cree.  Although I'm surrounded by small grocery stores where I could ask the price of something in Chinese, Vietnamese, and even Lao, there is nowhere that I could buy groceries in Cree; there is nowhere that I could have a simple dialogue (such as "how much does this cost?") in this language, on a daily basis.  This is part of what it entails for a language to be endangered: those who really want to devote the hours to learning it cannot practice by happenstance, but really need to contrive the circumstances to get other speakers into the same room (at the same time) to have even the most basic and pointless discussion imaginable.

When I showed up in Saskatchewan (and formally enrolled to gain a university degree in Cree, as a language) I was optimistic in a very practical sense: although many people warned me about how bad the (institutional) situation here would be, it seemed to me that it couldn't possibly be worse than Cambodia.  There were desks, electric lights, working bathrooms, and even a library: how could it possibly be worse than conditions I'd already known in Laos and Cambodia?

It was, and it is.  A little more than a year later, I'm in a position to report that the situation in Saskatchewan really is worse than Cambodia.  Canada really is playing out the endgame to cultural genocide --and the porcelain bathrooms and well-lit libraries don't help at all.

Universities spend huge quantities of money importing animals to be vivisected in laboratories (including, incidentally, monkeys from Cambodia [exported to the U.S., and to England, etc.]), and they manage to assemble huge contraptions in the name of science (including, incidentally, an "airship" [or Zeppelin] that they painted an Oji-Cree name onto the side of).  Why is it so difficult to get five people sitting around a table, practicing simple sentences, in a native language?

That question does have specific answers.  Many of them are political, others merely bureaucratic, and a minority could be called cultural.  I have had the benefit of meeting and speaking to some of the people who are themselves (more-or-less) mute witnesses to the endgame to cultural genocide that's now unfolding, and who make a study of what those reasons are.  Various institutions are failing in various ways to provide exactly what everyone knows is necessary for an endangered language to survive (or revive).  I didn't just speak to F.N.U., I spoke to institutions from coast to coast (or, at least, from B.C. to Quebec) --across a range that included universities, colleges, and small community centers.

When I lived in Laos, I explained to various people (sometimes in English, and sometimes in Lao) that I would not return to Canada unless I were to learn an indigenous language there (be it Cree, Ojibwe, or otherwise).  There were various reactions.  The Lao understood clearly the distinction between "indigenous" and "non-indigenous" (both as applied to peoples and languages) --these concepts had currency in their own political circumstances.  However, they were extremely unwilling to regard white people as "non-indigenous" in far-away places such as Australia and Canada.  I can remember explaining it also in parallel to the significance of a foreigner learning Lao if he lived in Laos, and Chinese if he lived in China; I would say very simple things (partly because of my limited ability in Lao), such as, "If I wanted to speak English, I would live in England; and if I wanted to speak French, I would live in France".

For a period of about one year, I was able to live up to my own hype in this respect: I completed four courses in the Cree language in the space of 12 months.  I then came to realize that my long-term future in working on the language was already over (whereas I had been hoping that it had just begun).

Canada will never be a "New France", and it will never be a "New England", either; it will forever be defined by the languages and the peoples who were indigenous here --both present and absent, both extant and extinct.  I refuse to be a part of that process of genocide; I said that I wouldn't return to Canada if I couldn't learn Cree, and now that I've proven that I can't learn Cree (despite enrolling in a university program to do exactly that) my resolution is to pack up and leave as soon as possible (as I did once before, many years ago).

I haven't met one other student who actually wants to learn Cree, and I haven't met a single student who has been able to learn Cree through the university system.  I entered the program understanding very well that I would need to spend hundreds of hours writing out words and phrases, listening to audio recordings, and practicing speech, spelling, reading and writing.  I was accustomed to all of that --and I was accustomed to doing it in much more difficult conditions.  I have never had a teacher for any of the other languages I've studied (not Lao, not Pali, not Cambodian, etc.).  Nevertheless, what I brought to the equation wasn't enough: I came to the grim realization that the program at F.N.U. is worse than nothing at all.

I found it difficult to believe that any language class could really be that bad, but over the course of 12 months, it became proven to me.  I have stated this (both verbally and in writing) to my professors: with sadness, I have to admit that the classes are so bad that they are actually a worse use of the student's time than sitting alone with the dictionary and the audio recordings.  The fundamental praxis of speaking in sentences was neither what was being taught, nor learned; nor were any of the students doing it in their spare time; nor was any arrangement possible to spend time hearing or speaking the language (above and beyond coursework).

Instead, students memorized isolated words and rules that were well-suited to testing, and the ensuing tests were easy to get high scores on.  My classmates included several athletes who were taking the courses only to increase their grade averages, two aspiring medical technicians who were trying to raise their grades to meet the minimum requirements for their program, and an array of others who had absolutely no interest in speaking a word of the language after the course had ended.  Many remarked that Cree was much easier than the courses in any other language (including French) for those who had degrees requiring a credit in a "foreign" language.

It was, in short, well-known on campus, that Cree was an easy A+ --and, indeed, it was.  Unfortunately, the A+ did not correspond to the ability to say a single sentence in the Cree language --not even, "How much does this cost?", nor "Where is the bathroom?".  Those are two good examples of sentences that none of the A+ students could manage at the end of the program.  I don't think that this would be true of any other living language taught at the university level.

It was especially depressing for me that we heard very little of the language spoken aloud by the professor(s) in class: months would pass without anything like listening-comprehension work, and without hearing a complete sentence.  After many months, I tried to politely request that something like a children's story be read for the students, so that I could hear a solid paragraph or two spoken continuously (rather than the isolated words that were, as mentioned, directly linked to the exams).

I've discussed this (in much greater detail) with several of the professors at F.N.U., and I do appreciate that they listened with real interest.  They agreed with many of the specifics that I pointed out (in at least one case, a professor warned me in advance of problems that I would later encounter) but they seemed to regard themselves as powerless to make any kind of substantive change.  They're not bad people, and they don't have bad intentions.  They have a bad institution with bad results, that has emerged (ersatz) as a surreal irony at the end of a long political history in which the entire Canadian educational system (not merely the residential schools) actively sought to drive these languages to extinction, while upholding the supremacy of European languages and learning.  It simply isn't the case that we're building on 300 years of scholarship in Cree: we're looking at the ruins left behind by state-sponsored genocide, and a few odd anthropologists and Christian missionaries who produced language studies along the way.

The Canadian university system has been (and remains) more interested in the study of Latin and Ancient Greek than it is in Cree; it wouldn't be difficult to demonstrate that more resources are now going into these languages than Cree, Ojibwe, etc., combined (and, of course, this has been even more stark over the last 300 years cumulatively).  Although this is sad for many different reasons, the one that I would draw attention to here is this: Canada will never be the greatest country in the world to study Latin or Greek.  Never.  It doesn't matter if the budget for those languages is doubled or tripled: Canada could at best achieve mediocrity relative to Europe in the scholarship of European languages.

If your country is a European colony that defines itself in terms of European culture, then you'll always be second-rate in the very same culture that you valorize: Canada simply has no unique advantage in any of these areas, and will always be at the same kind of disadvantage as Australia.  Despite the endless propaganda of the C.B.C. on the subject, I don't know if anyone in this country is really deluded enough to believe that Canada could ever be a great country to study English literature in (or French literature, for that matter).  Nobody in Canada seems to be convinced of the importance of Australian literature, nor are the Australians very impressed with our output in Canada; on the contrary, all of the former colonies merely shuffle along with their second-tier, derivative traditions, that they pour resources into promoting (and exaggerating the importance of) for the domestic audience.

Likewise, Canada will never be a great place to learn Chinese; at most, it can hope for mediocrity (at great expense) for the same fundamental reasons.  Nevertheless, the resources put into teaching Chinese (in the current generation) are enormous compared to Cree, Ojibwe, or any indigenous language (and a simple glance at a map of where any of these languages can be studied within Canada will convince anyone of this).

Meanwhile, the languages, heritage, history and politics that Canada has a unique advantage in dealing with (and a unique responsibility to deal with) are being neglected, for the sake of some really third-rate attempts to reproduce the "high culture" of other continents.

Canada is never going to have the world's greatest ballet, nor opera; it is never going to have the world's greatest Beijing Opera [京劇/京剧], either.  Conversely, we're always going to be burdened with the legacy of the terrible mess we've made of First Nations languages, literature --and the treatment of the First Nations peoples themselves.

It would be completely laughable if anyone said that the generations of the future would judge "us" (Canadians) by how well or how poorly we had reproduced the high culture of Europe.  Conversely, I think that nobody would deny that history really will judge Canada in terms of its ongoing erasure of its indigenous peoples, languages, and so on.

For a whole generation, it is already too late.  For myself in particular, it is already too late.

I will never have another opportunity to learn Cree, such as I thought I would have at F.N.U.; when it became clear that there was no such opportunity at F.N.U., I sought out any other opportunity elsewhere, and found none --receiving some very blunt advice in reply indicating that other universities may regard their own language programs as even more hopeless!  However, the most hopeless aspect of the equation is this: I honestly have not met even one other student who is seeking out such opportunities.  Although I met many students who reflected on the political importance on the language, and many who praised me for the efforts that they could see I was making, and while I spoke to several young parents who said that they would (hypothetically) like to help their children learn the language (without knowing it themselves), I simply never met anyone who was doing the work --nor anyone who aspired to do it.

Religious Identity in the Canadian Census

Canada does not operate under the principle of the separation of church and state (quite the contrary: we were founded as a British Empire colony governed through the collusion of church and state, and our "constitution"* opens with the declaration of "the supremacy of God").

* [The meaning of the word "constitution" is debatable: the document in question is actually called "Schedule B of the British North America Act", and it was, along with its prequel, an act of British Parliament.]

Although the disadvantages are numerous, the lack-of-a-separation between church and state entails that our census does report on religious identity (unlike the American government's census, that refuses to ask the question as a matter of principle).

If you're expecting to see the numbers from the 2011 census data, you may be waiting a few years yet.  The findings are "rolled out" in a series of thematically-specific reports.  The data on religion from the 2001 census was published in May of 2003; the publication of the 2011 results (pertaining to religion) are not yet on the docket for 2012.

The most striking thing about the data that I'm looking at is the near-zero rate of reporting for aboriginal religion (or First Nations "traditional religion", or whatever term we might apply).

In the year 2001, the only province or territory with a non-zero value for "Aboriginal Spirituality" was the Northwest Territories, where this category amounted to only 0.6%.

It is astounding to see an absolute zero for this category (or any equivalent category) in provinces like Saskatchewan, that have large populations identifying as First Nations (but not, apparently, identifying their religion as such).  Part of the reality here is that a very large proportion of Canada's indigenous people do identify themselves as Christian (with invidious divisions between Protestant and Catholic contested between communities, and sometimes within them).  In Southern Saskatchewan, I note, even the Mormons have made some efforts to convert the Cree and Saulteux, and I heard a few verbal anecdotes indicating that they have had at least a few converts so far.  Another part of the reality may be "survey fatigue", as the census has very specific questions for self-identification as aboriginal, including specific band association (i.e., a greater degree of specificity than for other ethnic groups).

There may also be a significant cultural difference between the expression of indigenous identity (qua religious identity) in the U.S. and Canada in the 21st century.  It will be interesting to see if these numbers remain at zero when the 2011 findings are published.

Unlike the U.S. data (that separately counted atheist, agnostic and "no religion") the Canadian data presents just one vague category of "no religion".  This has been re-enforced by having a check-mark box for the value of "no religion", in contrast to a blank line to write in any other religious identity as a noun of the respondent's choosing.  This standard continued in the 2011 census (see illustration).  In a sense, this precludes the possibility of diverse self-identification as various shades of "atheist", etc., and encourages the respondents themselves to subscribe to the category offered (if their religion does not correspond to the type given in the list of suggested identities on the left-hand side of the form).

Of course, an even more fundamental assumption predetermined by the wording on the census form is that each person can have only one religion.  In many cultural contexts (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, etc.) the opposite is true; we cannot guess from the census data to what extent the opposite might be true in Canada.  The reality of having more than one (simultaneous) religious identity can (and does) extend to people having multiple marriage ceremonies, and even multiple funerals.  Currently, this remains outside of the remit of the census.

The headline-grabbing story that emerges from the census data is that "no religion" has increased significantly across the country, and also that it varies significantly between provinces.  In the bottom half of the first illustration, you can see that Saskatchewan is significantly more secular than Quebec; however, Quebec itself also has a significant increase within the "no religion" category.

The other story, here, is that Canada is much more Catholic than it is commonly imagined to be: Catholicism is the single largest religion in Canada (43% in 2001) and this is not only for historical reasons, but is also re-enforced by ongoing patterns of immigration.  New immigrants who had arrived (in Canada) between 1991 and May of 2001 were only 4.6% Buddhist; 23% identified as Roman Catholic, the single largest religion amongst new immigrants, with Muslims constituting 15% by contrast.  However, new immigrants were also very frequently secular: 21.3% opted for the "no religion" category.

Without digressing into specific denominations, it is no surprise to anyone living in Canada that "mainstream protestantism" has been on the decline, coeval with a number of small sects increasing their numbers.  Roughly aggregating all protestants together, their share of the population declined from 35% (in 1991) to only 29% (in 2001).  I say that this is done "roughly", for several reasons, one of the most striking being that (in 2001) a statistically significant 2.6% of respondents identified as "Christian", with no further denomination or identification.  The decade's decline in the number of protestants would be much less dramatic if we were willing to assume that this further category was largely comprised of "misc. protestants" --or even if we were willing to assume that half of this category was protestant.

Contrary to many inflated claims that I have seen around the internet, Buddhism is not now (2001) and never has been a numerically significant religion in Canada; both its absolute size and its growth (1991–2001) are puny relative even to Islam.  As we should see the 2011 data within a few years, it might be interesting for anyone to take out a bet on whether or not these trends will continue.

The establishment of Buddhism in Canada (such as it is) has transpired in the shadow of war: the relocation of refugees (and wartime allies) created in the 20th century's wars in Asia brought Buddhists to Canada (the arrival of our Lao and Cambodian populations were very directly linked to that chapter of history, and do not reflect a constant form of economic migration; there have been several academic studies on the phenomenon, e.g., Penny Van Esterik, 1992).  The wars of the 21st century, following a familiar pattern, are now relocating Muslim populations to Canada.  I hear this discussed in a rather strange voice on C.B.C. radio, as if the broadcasters are not quite sure what angle to put on the fact that both refugees from Afghanistan and former allies/employees of the Canadian military are applying to permanently relocate to the country, and openly state that their families would be targeted if they remained in Afghanistan.

As with the evacuation of forces from Vietnam in the 1970s, there's an implicit recognition of military defeat if it is (in fact) impossible for the supposed conqueror's allies to remain in the country that they have allegedly conquered after the conquest is complete.  If (e.g.) the men employed as translators for the Canadian forces would be in danger if they remained in their countries of origin, this is a reasonable indicator of the extent to which Canada not only "lost the war", but has also created enduring hostility, and the conditions for civil war to ensue thereafter.  I do not think that this transfer of population will be from Afghanistan only, and I do not think that the full extent of it will be captured in the 2011 census (i.e., there will be a lag, for many years after the conclusion of the war, as with refugee camps on the Lao border continuing to send "evacuees" to the U.S. and Canada for a period of decades after the military had withdrawn, etc.).