Residential schools banned native languages. The Cree want theirs back.
“The more he spoke, the more punishment he received,” Johnson said.
It’s a legacy of Ermineskin that Johnson, now 55 and a paralegal, can’t speak the language of her people. Nor can her six siblings. Across Canada, the often brutal residential school system, designed to assimilate Indigenous people into White, European culture, succeeded in breaking the tradition of passing on languages from generation to generation — and put the survival of some in jeopardy.
But now, 25 years after the last residential school was shuttered, some Indigenous communities — including the one here that Pope Francis visited Monday — are reviving and relearning their native languages. It’s a movement fueled by a desire to recover what has been lost, and by a sense that progress is possible. The youngest Cree didn’t attend residential schools. Unlike their parents or grandparents, they didn’t internalize the idea that speaking their language might be wrong.
Isaiah Swampy Omeasoo, 20, studied and made himself fluent in Cree. His wife is expecting a child in February, he said, and he’ll speak to his son or daughter in the language.
“I wanted to change the pattern,” he said. “It’s not going to skip another generation.”
In Maskwacîs — an area with four First Nations reserves on the Alberta prairie between Edmonton and Calgary — Cree, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Canada, can be found written on stop signs, municipal buildings and emergency vehicles. A local radio station has Cree-speaking DJs. The school district says its mission is about “embedding” Cree culture and language into education — a direct response to the damage wrought by residential schools.
But restoring a language isn’t easy. Steve Wood, the vice principal at the high school, said only six of 54 staff members can speak Cree fluently. Many in the community aren’t conversational. Robert Ward Jr., the radio station manager, says he sometimes runs into ideas on air that he can’t express because he lacks the vocabulary. He’ll admit as much on live radio, he says, with the hope that an elder will call in and help him.
“This is a language that’s been taken from us,” he said.
For the bulk of the 20th century, Indigenous children in Canada were forcibly removed from their families to be placed in residential schools — often hundreds of miles from their communities — where they were forbidden to speak their native languages or practice cultural traditions. Some were physically and sexually abused.
The United States also ran what were called Indian boarding schools through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Interior Department is now investigating abuses in that system.
In Canada, a majority of the schools were run by Catholic entities. When Francis delivered his apology here Monday for the church’s role in the residential school system, he noted how Indigenous languages and cultures had been “denigrated and suppressed.” Many in Maskwacîs felt the pope’s apology was necessary and helpful. But they also noted that in delivering his words in his native Spanish, he was exercising a privilege that they were denied.
“If you look at the pope, he was speaking in his language,” Johnson said. “How come my father couldn’t speak in his own language?”
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools reported on the many punishments to which children were subjected for trying to speak their languages. One former student testified about being given a close haircut. Others said they were beaten with straps, or had their mouths washed out with soap.
Many arrived at the schools knowing little or no English or French, triggering the wrath of nuns who expected them to understand instructions. Over time, some children forgot their own languages or suppressed them, to return home and struggle to communicate with their parents.
More than 70 Indigenous languages are spoken in Canada, but they’re far less prevalent in everyday life than English and French — Canada’s two official languages — or even languages spoken by many of the country’s immigrant groups.
It wasn’t until 2019 that simultaneous translation services for an Indigenous language were available in Parliament. That year, for the first time, a National Hockey League game was broadcast in Plains Cree. Elections Canada offers information guides in 16 Indigenous languages, but ballots are in English and French.
The share of the Indigenous population with the ability to speak an Indigenous language well enough to have a conversation declined from 22 percent in 2006 to 16 percent in 2016, according to the federal census. On the bright side, the proportion of people who learned an Indigenous language as a second language increased from 18 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in 2016.
UNESCO in 2010 recognized 86 Indigenous languages in Canada, but warned that 32 of them were “critically endangered,” meaning they were “used mostly by very few speakers, of the great-grandparental generation.”
Several of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action centered on language and culture. They included recommendations that the federal government recognize that Indigenous rights include language rights and that universities offer degree programs in Indigenous languages. Several now do.
Parliament passed legislation in 2019 to provide long-term funding to reclaim and strengthen Indigenous languages and to establish a commissioner of Indigenous languages who must report on progress annually. The first commissioner was appointed last year.
And after Indigenous groups said last year that ground-penetrating radar had uncovered evidence of unmarked graves near the sites of several former residential schools, the government announced it would allow Indigenous people to reclaim their traditional names — often changed at the schools — on government identification for free until 2026.
Lorna Williams, an associate professor emeritus of Indigenous education at the University of Victoria, said the 2019 legislation was “important in giving the message that Canada itself now finally gives some importance to Indigenous languages, and that makes a huge difference.”
But “what has made a difference, really up until now,” she added, “has been the efforts of the people themselves in the Indigenous-language communities.”
Though most education in Canada is administered by the provinces and territories, on First Nations reserves, it’s funded by the federal government. Critics say the chronic underfunding of reserve schools has effectively institutionalized inequalities.
In 2018, the four First Nations in Maskwacîs signed an agreement with the federal government that gave them far greater control over education, allowing them to offer and design a curriculum infused with the Cree language, culture and traditions.
Brian Wildcat, the superintendent of the Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission, said educators are planning to pilot a new curriculum in the fall with a heavy focus on the Cree language, identity and way of life. He hopes it eventually will replace the district’s current curriculum, which was written by the province.
Wildcat’s mother was a teacher who brought language and culture into her classrooms.
“The residential schools were weapons used against the community to destroy families, destroy the community and get rid of the identity of the Cree people,” he said. “Our schools today are the tool for hope and change that are based on what the community wants.”
Wood, the vice principal, called restoring the language a “monumental effort” — and one that requires immersion. So he tries to use Cree as much as he can: when ordering a sandwich at the local Subway or filling his car up at the gas station. “The language has to be heard for people to pick it up,” he said.
It’s with the young people, he said, where he sees progress.
“We have kids that come home from our kindergarten schools who know more Cree than their parents,” Wood said. “It’s a product of what transpired.”