| Abstract | Recent decades have seen the creation of hundreds of Indigenous language revitalization and reclamation projects across Canada. Most are located inside Indigenous communities; a few are centred in universities. They range in scale from the ambitious, multi-language efforts of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council (FPCC), which is located in and funded by the Province of British Columbia and is active there and elsewhere in Canada (https://fpcc.ca/), to unfunded one- or two-person volunteer efforts in remote communities
The project that I have the honour to lead described in this paper – and on this periodically updated website: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/research-collaboration/programs/canadian-indigenous-languages-technology-project – is managed inside the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), which is the primary research and technology organization of the Government of Canada. However, the reader should not conclude that “settler” (non-Indigenous) governments play a key role in Indigenous language revitalization in Canada. All successful language revitalization projects that I am aware of are Indigenous-run or collaborate closely with Indigenous language activists.
Our Indigenous Languages Technology (ILT) project at NRC (henceforth, “NRC-ILT”) is not itself a language revitalization project: it builds tools that people working on language revitalization sometimes find useful. We – the NRC-ILT team – are like lighting technicians or stagehands in a theatre: we are not the actors (we do not appear on stage), nor are we in charge of the production. Those roles are filled by Indigenous language activists and their communities. Language revitalization would go on without us. At times, however, our technical help may make it go slightly better. Everything we have accomplished has been done in collaboration with Indigenous stakeholders. |
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