Virtual elder rekindles hope for revival of Canadian aboriginal language
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Zhao Qing, Yang Shilong
It has long been a heart-broken yet helpless reality for Canada's aboriginal people that their native languages, which are at the very core of their identity, are disappearing.
The 2001 national survey by Statistics Canada suggests that just 24 percent of North American Indians, Inuit and Metis can still converse in their ancestral tongue.
The situation becomes increasingly worse with the passing of the elders in aboriginal communities. They actually are the only fluent speakers left as a result of more than a century of abuse and mistreatment under the infamous Canadian Indian residential school system.
The church-run, government funded system, founded in the 19th century, was intended to force the assimilation of the country's indigenous people into the European-Canadian society.
Fortunately, now the cutting-edge hightechs are enabling the aboriginals to make digital recordings of their elders and upload them on-line for training the young generation, reigniting hopes to preserve the past and reshape the future.
One group of such people is the Ktunaxa Nation, who had a thriving culture going back 10,000 years in southeastern British Columbia, about four hours drive west of Canada's oil-rich city of Calgary.
With a population of about 1,500, the Ktunaxa has four bands in the East Kootenay region, which are separated by hundreds of kilometers of mountainous terrain.
"When the elders are gone, we don't want to be in a position where we're saying 'I wish we had'," said Don Maki, the Ktunaxa Nation's director of traditional knowledge and language, in a recent interview with Xinhua.
Maki said they lost 24 of their 48 fluent speaking elders since 2002. Now the oldest speaker is 90, and the youngest 72.
One of 11 language families in Canada, Ktunaxa is a cultural isolate, meaning that no other language in the world is closely related to it. Consequently, when it is gone, it is gone forever.
"We try to be as forward-thinking as possible ... we can create a virtual elder who can sit around with the kids in the classroom, " he said.
The Ktunaxa have been digitally archiving their language since 1999 and they built their own broadband network in 2007 in order to make a better use of these language training resources.
The 7.7-million-Canadian-dollars (about 7 million U.S. dollars) Ktunaxa Nation Network is currently the only native-owned open- fiber-to-the-home net work in North America, providing speeds of 100 megabits per second to each home.
"We're now wired like no other community in North America," Maki sadi. "Not many people get a chance to change the course of predicted history, but with hard work and fiber, we will."
Four community learning centers has been set up in each of the Ktunaxa communities, all of them are equipped with high speed internet and vedio-conferencing devices. Specially trained staff there offer online educational classes or technical assistance to band members.
Young Ktunaxas can use FirstVoices, a free database that hosts interactive community-built dictionaries, story and song libraries, etc., to look up words or phrases to hear how they are pronounced. So far a total of 2,487 words and 849 phrases of the Ktunaxa language have been inducted into the database. Online language courses for credit are also available with the cooperation of a local college.
One of the learning centers was housed at the basement of the main building of St. Eugene Mission Resort, about 10 kilometers from Cranbrook, British Columbia.
The casino and golf resort, now owned and operated by three nations including Ktunaxa, is a former residential school where Ktunaxa children were sent to learn "civilized ways" between 1910 and 1970. They were forbidden to speak their own language and were punished if they did.
For the Ktunaxa people, turning the school into a resort represents an effort to turn the pain of the past into a positive symbol of strength and renewal.
However, Dorothy Alpine, Ktunaxa language translator at the St. Eugene center, said that it is more important to keep their language alive. -- Xinhua
It has long been a heart-broken yet helpless reality for Canada's aboriginal people that their native languages, which are at the very core of their identity, are disappearing.
The 2001 national survey by Statistics Canada suggests that just 24 percent of North American Indians, Inuit and Metis can still converse in their ancestral tongue.
The situation becomes increasingly worse with the passing of the elders in aboriginal communities. They actually are the only fluent speakers left as a result of more than a century of abuse and mistreatment under the infamous Canadian Indian residential school system.
The church-run, government funded system, founded in the 19th century, was intended to force the assimilation of the country's indigenous people into the European-Canadian society.
Fortunately, now the cutting-edge hightechs are enabling the aboriginals to make digital recordings of their elders and upload them on-line for training the young generation, reigniting hopes to preserve the past and reshape the future.
One group of such people is the Ktunaxa Nation, who had a thriving culture going back 10,000 years in southeastern British Columbia, about four hours drive west of Canada's oil-rich city of Calgary.
With a population of about 1,500, the Ktunaxa has four bands in the East Kootenay region, which are separated by hundreds of kilometers of mountainous terrain.
"When the elders are gone, we don't want to be in a position where we're saying 'I wish we had'," said Don Maki, the Ktunaxa Nation's director of traditional knowledge and language, in a recent interview with Xinhua.
Maki said they lost 24 of their 48 fluent speaking elders since 2002. Now the oldest speaker is 90, and the youngest 72.
One of 11 language families in Canada, Ktunaxa is a cultural isolate, meaning that no other language in the world is closely related to it. Consequently, when it is gone, it is gone forever.
"We try to be as forward-thinking as possible ... we can create a virtual elder who can sit around with the kids in the classroom, " he said.
The Ktunaxa have been digitally archiving their language since 1999 and they built their own broadband network in 2007 in order to make a better use of these language training resources.
The 7.7-million-Canadian-dollars (about 7 million U.S. dollars) Ktunaxa Nation Network is currently the only native-owned open- fiber-to-the-home net work in North America, providing speeds of 100 megabits per second to each home.
"We're now wired like no other community in North America," Maki sadi. "Not many people get a chance to change the course of predicted history, but with hard work and fiber, we will."
Four community learning centers has been set up in each of the Ktunaxa communities, all of them are equipped with high speed internet and vedio-conferencing devices. Specially trained staff there offer online educational classes or technical assistance to band members.
Young Ktunaxas can use FirstVoices, a free database that hosts interactive community-built dictionaries, story and song libraries, etc., to look up words or phrases to hear how they are pronounced. So far a total of 2,487 words and 849 phrases of the Ktunaxa language have been inducted into the database. Online language courses for credit are also available with the cooperation of a local college.
One of the learning centers was housed at the basement of the main building of St. Eugene Mission Resort, about 10 kilometers from Cranbrook, British Columbia.
The casino and golf resort, now owned and operated by three nations including Ktunaxa, is a former residential school where Ktunaxa children were sent to learn "civilized ways" between 1910 and 1970. They were forbidden to speak their own language and were punished if they did.
For the Ktunaxa people, turning the school into a resort represents an effort to turn the pain of the past into a positive symbol of strength and renewal.
However, Dorothy Alpine, Ktunaxa language translator at the St. Eugene center, said that it is more important to keep their language alive. -- Xinhua