What it means to lose our languages

Fort Rupert First Nation, BC

I’ve just read “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. It’s a harrowing story of a human dystopia that is brought on by a nearly complete plague of blindness that sweeps through the entire population. It is like a modern day Kafka tale that, as the blurbs say, sums up the deepest horrors of the twentieth century.

In the book, society quickly breaks down as everyone becomes blind and human morality and ethics follow suit. More frightening though is the resignation of the bands of people who wander around the city trying to find food, unsure of where they are, unsure of who is with them. It’s easy to become lost when there is no one to help you find your way home. Saramago plumbs the depths of this chilling scenario with a style that is detached so that his voice becomes one of a parable maker, a distant, dispassionate eye witnessing the unfolding scene.

It’s a disturbing book, but in some ways it is no more disturbing than the loss that I see around me right now. I’m in Fort Rupert today, a small First Nation on the north coast of Vancouver Island. As I write this I am sitting in the big house watching an Open Space meeting with about 50 First Nations youth unfold. There is a huge fire in the centre of the building, fed by logs that are 3 feet long. On either side of me massive carved poles 10 or 12 feet around rise into the smoky depths of the ceiling, some 40 feet above me. It is dark and smoky and cold inside and the only light comes from the fire and some soft lighting along the tops of the walls.

The youth are deeply engaged in issues that are important to them and one of those issues is language. One youth has posted a topic called “Without language who do we know who we are or where we are?” and it brought to mind Saramago’s book.

I wish I could write a novel that talks about the impact if the loss of Aboriginal language in a way that captures the same harrowing disorientation of “Blindness.” Here on the coast, the deepest knowledge of the land, of humans’ relations to it and to each other are bound up in the language, If you can’t use Kwa’kwa’kala to speak to one another, nothing makes sense.

The only way I can give you a sense of the impact of the loss is to have you imagine what it would be like to go through life without having words for anything. And imagine too that as you stopped calling things by their names, they fade away so that in a few short years you don’t even remember what it was you had – it’s all gone. Imagine that this would be true for everything you owned, everyone you love, everything you know.

And then imagine that you were granted a wish and that you did get a language, but it wasn’t yours. You are grateful for the chance to speak again and bring your world back, and you struggle to remember what it was you once knew. You try to describe your children with this new language and what reappears is some crude facsimile of your kids. You try to talk about what the land means and to remember how to live on it, but it’s just a rude approximation of what you once knew and so the land comes back looking different. You don’t recognize the animals and plants. You can’t remember what you once knew about them.

That’s the impact that losing Aboriginal languages is having on communities in this country. As the languages die out, a world fades away and the human community loses the capacity to speak about and understand the complex systems of the coastal forest and the societies that evolved within them. When we use English to describe this land now we miss 90% of what is really there. We can’t see it anymore, we can’t feel it and we certainly can’t connect with it.

Here in the big house, there is a living breathing culture, and Elders and some youth are speaking their language, dancing and singing their songs. The practices that have knitted together community and Nations have been undertaken almost unbroken for thousands of years here. But in the twentieth century, the ceremonies were banned and the language was drummed out of children at residential school and in a few short generations we have lost almost everything.

These youth and the Elders who are with them are living proof that there is something left and that it’s worth fighting for and hanging on to. Languages bring worlds into being and when we lose a language as a human community we lose a world. As we struggle on this planet to be with the massive changes all around us, we need as many world views as possible. We need the diversity to understand and make meaning from the complexity. Anything you can do to support that effort benefits us all.