Tackling Canada’s Discrimination Against Indigenous Language Education

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Unlike English and French, instruction in Cree or Inuktitut isn’t enshrined. Scholar Lorena Sekwan Fontaine on how to fix that.

Lorena Sekwan Fontaine has spent decades thinking about discrimination against Indigenous Peoples and its impact on the intergenerational transmission of languages and cultures.

Fontaine is a trained lawyer and an associate professor of arts and head of the Indigenous studies department at the University of Manitoba. She is Cree and Anishinaabe and a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation.

Fontaine grew up speaking English, not the languages of her ancestors: Ojibwe and Cree.

This is due to the legacy of Canada’s residential school system, which forcibly removed 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and abused kids for speaking their languages. It’s also thanks to the fact that, unlike with French and English, Indigenous language instruction is not enshrined in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Fontaine turned her focus towards Indigenous language education rights after learning there could be no restitution for Elders robbed of their languages and cultures by their time in residential schools, because there was no legal protection for their right to their languages and cultures.

“I was quite upset that these Elders were told that they didn’t have language rights to their own culture and identity, and that lawyers couldn’t do anything,” she said.

Fontaine was an expert witness for the Senate hearings on the Indigenous Languages Act, which affirms language rights but does not spell out exactly what those rights entail.

Her research into Indigenous language rights and Canada’s history of linguicide is the subject of the one-hour CBC Radio Ideas documentary “Undoing Linguicide.”

This year the University of Manitoba Press will publish Living Language Rights: Constitutional Pathways to Indigenous Language Education, in which Fontaine lays out her argument for legal recognition and enforcement of Indigenous language rights, including in education.

The Tyee spoke with Fontaine about how to make Indigenous language right to education a reality in Canada. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Can you explain what “linguicide” means?

Lorena Sekwan Fontaine: Linguicide means basically the killing of a language. For Indigenous languages in Canada, I look at it in the context of education, that our education system still does not support Indigenous language immersion programs. The residential school policy was intended to kill Indigenous languages, and it still arguably continues under the current educational system because Indigenous children don’t have full access to their language in schools.

Our language is intertwined with the learning of the culture, as with most other languages. So when you’re learning the language, you’re learning the culture. Because of that, Indigenous children that aren’t accessing their language aren’t accessing knowledge about their cultural identity, too.

Are you advocating for something similar to the French immersion system we have in Canada, where some instruction may still be in English, or are you looking for education entirely in the Indigenous language?

I think we need both. We need options, and I think it would be up to the community to decide what they would want. Whether it’s a First Nations, Métis or Inuit community that wants a language program, or whether it’s a community with an urban setting, they would have the opportunity to develop or offer a language program in the way that they feel is important to them.

Immersion doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re learning the identity of that culture: oftentimes you’re getting math in French or math in English. In an ideal situation, we would have language programs where the urriculum revolved around the teaching of Indigenous culture, as well.

If every community wanted their own program, how many languages would that be?

A different way of addressing that question is we need Indigenous communities to be able to have that option provided to them. It doesn’t mean that all Indigenous communities are going to want immersion programs or schools; some Indigenous communities might want to keep English, French or French immersion programs.

We have over 50 Indigenous languages, depending on which stats you’re going to look at; international stats say it’s closer to 90. Those languages come from 10 or 11 distinct language families. From those language families are dialects and other languages that have evolved into other regional languages or dialects.

So even to be able to identify how many languages there are, you’re going to get different numbers from different people. The key here is that the option should be available to all Indigenous communities and that these programs have core funding and resources to support them.

What does Canada’s Constitution say about Indigenous language rights in Canada?

The Constitution in the way that it’s drafted right now does not say anything about Indigenous language. But the Indigenous Languages Act that was passed a few years ago says that Section 35 of the Constitution recognizes Indigenous language rights.

What does that mean in terms of a right of an Indigenous person to access — or to have their children access — education in their language?

The Indigenous Languages Act does not define what language rights are. We don’t know what that means in the context of the legislation. And this goes back to another issue that arose when the Constitution was amended to include Aboriginal and treaty rights: it just says that Aboriginal treaty rights hereby are affirmed and are recognized. A lot of communities have had to go into court to have the court define what those rights actually mean.

The Indigenous Languages Act just says that language rights exist under Section 35, but it doesn’t define the right. There’s a provision in the legislation that says that First Nations, Inuit and Métis people can negotiate agreements to determine what those language rights entail. The federal government during that time said that they didn’t want to define language rights because it was up to First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities to define what that means.

The current legislation does not contain any enforceable rights or guarantees to funding for immersion programs or for schools to teach Indigenous languages. But the legislation was an important step, because prior to that, Indigenous language rights were not recognized anywhere.

Would this lack of definition require First Nations, Inuit or Métis communities to go to the courts to determine what these rights are?

No. And in fact, when this went through the Senate, Sen. Murray Sinclair and Sen. Mary Jane McCallum identified that the language rights are not defined and they’re not enforceable in the legislation. Because they had identified this as a major flaw, they had requested a three-year review, which was supposed to take place in 2024.

My understanding is that there is some kind of government review underway right now, but it’s another study which is not going to help. The goal of the review is to look at the legislation and address the gaps identified by First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. They all want the legislation to have enforceable language rights. They wanted assurances that there would be a right to core sustainable funding for language programs.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/02/21/Tack ... Education/