[nativestudies-l] York Univ. policy supports indigenous languages

[Alyssa Mt. Pleasant]

Graduate courses to be offered in native languages at York U
 
Shannon Proudfoot
Canwest News Service


Wednesday, August 13, 2008

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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."

© Canwest News Service 2008

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=2fc6ad7c-943f-49ae-a295-b9ba9d3d7126
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