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<div class="storyheadline">Graduate courses to be offered in native
languages at York U</div>
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<td><font class="storybyline">Shannon Proudfoot</font></td>
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<td><font class="storypub">Canwest News Service</font></td>
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008</div>
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<p>Starting
this fall, York University will allow all graduate students to write
and defend major papers, projects and theses in an aboriginal language
rather than English or French. </p>
<p>The initiative, which York says
is a first in Canada, started with the school's faculty of
environmental studies when two grad students proposed completing
projects in their native language, and has now been approved for all
graduate students. </p>
<p>"It had a lot to do with the fact that a lot
of aboriginal languages are disappearing," says Barbara Rahder, dean of
the faculty of environmental studies. "Language is so closely tied with
knowledge and culture that to lose the language means to lose that
culture as well."</p>
<p>Rahder, the graduate program director to whom
the students made their initial request a few years ago, says both are
still at the university and intending to take up this language option
in the fall - one to complete a master's degree and the other a PhD.</p>
<p>There
are 15 First Nations grad students at York and approximately 400
aboriginals - including First Nations, Metis and Inuit students - in
the university's graduate and undergrad programs, according to the
aboriginal student community centre.</p>
<p>Rahder acknowledges this
move could open the door to other students asking to complete projects
in their own mother tongues, but says York has specific reasons for
targeting indigenous language speakers.</p>
<p>"Our reason for limiting
it at this point is because these are Canadian languages and I think we
have a responsibility to the native peoples of Canada to help them
essentially preserve their languages and their culture," she says.
"It's a social responsibility."</p>
<p>Students will have to submit
proposals in English and find advisers outside the department who
understand their language to supervise their projects, Rahder says. The
format for oral defence of thesis work will involve some "negotiation,"
she says, and could include a simultaneous interpreter or working
around words and concepts that can't be translated precisely.</p>
<p>"This
is definitely a good step, it's an overdue step," says Paul Chartrand,
director of the aboriginal governance program at the University of
Winnipeg, who suggests his institution will eventually make a similar
proposal.</p>
<p>According to York, there are more than 50 languages
belonging to 11 major families among Canada's first peoples. Chartrand
says analysts believe only three of them - Inuktitut, Cree and Ojibway
- stand a good chance of surviving in the future.</p>
<p>Aboriginal
languages carry added significance in this country because they are
spoken nowhere else, he says. If French or English or another language
that arrived in Canada on immigrant tongues were to die off here, it
would still be spoken in the nation where it originated, he says, but
if aboriginal languages die off, they're gone forever.</p>
<p>"Ideas are
best expressed in the original language. So an idea, a thought, a view
of the world of a people is expressed through its language," Chartrand
says. "If we lose a language, we lose irretrievably these particular
thoughts."</p>
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<div class="storycredit" align="center"> © Canwest News Service 2008</div>
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