By: Jonah Lazar, Staff Writer, and C Icart, co-Editor-in-Chief
SFU’s multilingual week took place from February 23–28, featuring a variety of workshops, presentations, and information booths primarily on SFU’s Burnaby campus. Multilingual week is celebrated annually by SFU to recognize the diversity in language and culture in our community. This year, a multitude of events were hosted, such as French writing workshops, Japanese calligraphy, and a film screening held at the Harbour Centre by SFU’s urban studies department. Additionally, students passing through the academic quadrangle will have noticed a half-dozen tables littered with a collection of leaflets, posters, pins, and booklets made by various language faculties and clubs under the collective multilingual week banner.
The keynote presentation of this week was given by Kyra Borland, who spoke on “Indigenous language revitalization outside academia,” which I attended on February 26 at SFU’s newly constructed First People’s Gathering House on Lhuḵw’lhuḵw’áyten (Burnaby Mountain). Borland is “of mixed Irish and Métis heritage.” Here, animated discussions swirled between a few dozen guests over banana bread and coffee, with most heralding from SFU’s linguistics and Indigenous studies departments.
Borland explained, “In my early career, I identified as a non-Indigenous linguist and it’s through my work with Métis Nation BC that I was able to unpack my own family’s Métis heritage and I’m actively doing the work to reclaim and position myself in that now.”
Academia, government, and community are the main three domains that she sees working together to support Indigenous language revitalization and given that they all do the work differently, she feels it’s more useful to “talk about different principles about how we carry out the work across these domains is important so that there’s a common ground for how we approach the work.” As she continued her presentation, she provided an account of her experience working in Indigenous language revitalization, with an emphasis on four important principles required to succeed in this field: humility, flexibility, compassion, and planning. When it comes to humility, she stressed that, “We need to centre the voices of speakers and learners and language advocates in developing programming.”
She also detailed how these three domains interact with Indigenous language revitalization in different ways: within academia, the establishment of research methods and best practices come to the forefront. The government’s role in this field is largely a case of designating funding, while the community plays an important role in the boots on the ground, day-to-day process of using and reclaiming these endangered Indigenous languages. Lastly, Borland gave advice to hopeful future practitioners, telling the audience of the importance of making connections, attending events, and applying for opportunities that may come their day.
Borland used storytelling to illustrate how the four principles she outlined have come up in her work. One of those stories even her own mother (who was in attendance) hadn’t heard before. Borland was early in her career and had crashed her car into a snowbank outside of a Stellat’en band council building on the banks of Fraser Lake. She confided in us that it had, in fact, taken nearly the whole band to help get her out of the snowbank. As I looked across to her mother in the audience, I saw her shaking her head in amusement at her daughter’s misfortune.
I appreciated learning about the trials and tribulations required to make a difference in helping threatened languages continue to be passed down through generations.
