Exhibition essay for Taskoch pipon kona kah nipa muskoseya, nepin pesim eti pimachihew | Like the winter snow kills the grass, the summer sun revives it at TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, AB.
Growing up in Millwoods, a predominantly South Asian community in the Southeast corner of Edmonton, I was surrounded by languages that were not familiar, that were not of this land, this territory. But neither is the English that I was taught. It’s an imperial language, the language of colonizers. It always amazed me to bear witness to my friends speaking to their families in their mother tongues [1] as this was something that I could not do back then and cannot do now. But it’s not my fault, any of our faults, that we were raised with foster languages while our mother tongues were kept from us, stolen from us, replaced.
Our ancestral languages are embedded in us—they are us. They are at the base of our world views and they shape how we see and relate to the world. But it is so much more than that. Language is the soil the nurtures us, lets us grow. We take root and are nourished within and by our language. It gives us life. Language is entwined with the land, they cannot be separated. Land is not a commodity or just a place. It is our life source, it is our kin. We learn from the land, and we learn our language from the land. How do they expect us to survive without our land, without our language? We need to nurture ourselves and the land to take back what is ours, what is us.
Historically, Indigenous peoples learned our languages from spending time on the land and intergenerationally through our parents, grandparents, aunties, and elders. Stories and teachings would be told about the land and of how things came to be. Land based intergenerational learning is still the best way to learn an ancestral language, but this is difficult when you do not live on or have access to the land. There are lucky outliers who grew up with their mother tongue on their ancestral territory, with their worldview embedded in the language and undamaged by imperial rule. Since colonization, many Indigenous people have been dispossessed from their lands and do not know their mother tongue, yet they still ache to learn and connect with their language. How are we expected to survive when we don't have the words to fight?
Indigenous languages are dying at an alarming rate across the world. Here in so-called-Canada, there are approximately 60 Indigenous languages [2], with only three of them predicted to survive the next 100 years—nêhiyawêwin, Ojibwemowin, and Inuktitut. With the loss of so many Indigenous languages, comes the loss of entire world views. Language shapes how we view and move through space and time; with the loss of our words, we lose our guide. Since the implementation of colonization, Indigenous peoples have had to fight for the right to exist. Our cultures, our territories, our languages were taken and the goal was genocide. Great strides are being made by Indigenous peoples here in so-called Canada and around the world towards the revitalization of Indigenous languages and to take back what was stolen. Language revitalization is a form of cultural resurgence, continuance, and survivance [3].
Encompassed within ancestral languages is so much more than just the straight translation of the word or phrase. There are specific epistemologies and ontologies encompassed within languages. Language is the pathway through which cultural dissemination takes place. It is through language that we retain our identities, values, and cultural practices. There are deeper meanings within the stories and they can take a lifetime to understand. These stories grow, with new meaning arising as one grows and ages within the world. When language stolen or dies, it is not just the words that are missing; it is thousands of years of ceremony and cultural understanding lost and never to be regained. Thousands of years of kinship bonds broken. Thousands of years of teachings from the land and elders that will never be able to nourish our minds and hearts.
It can be a tender act to learn the language of your ancestors. Living with and through a heart broken by 500 years of ongoing colonization takes a toll. To share time and space with your ancestral language can be an act of self-care. To resist and to persist in the face of the settler-colonial state that wants you gone—culturally and physically—requires care of oneself. Learning your ancestral language opens up the knowledge that has been known since time immemorial of ways to take care of one’s self, of others, and of the land; ways of knowing that vanished when forced into institutionalized settler-colonial settings. The delicate act of reconnecting to what makes you you, to the ways of your ancestors, requires a tender strength to overcome the shame instilled through colonization.
What does it mean to feel something so deeply but not have the words to explain it or to fully understand it? Those words, that feeling, embedded within you, but just out of reach. Searching for something that you know is there, but you just can’t take hold of it—not yet at least. These are the thoughts that race around my head whenever I try and explain what it’s like not knowing the language of your ancestors, your kin, those that brought you to this point. There is a thread tying us all together, but it has become frayed, knotted, tangled.
NOTES
[1] The most common use of the term “mother tongue” is to refer to the language that a person first learns and speaks at home. However, many Indigenous groups around the world use the term to refer to the language of their mother and/or ancestral language. The latter is the way in which I am using the term “mother tongue” in this essay and using it interchangeably with ancestral language.
[2] Gessner, Suzanne and Lorna Wanosts’a7 Williams. Indigenous Languages Recognition, Preservation and Revitalization: A Report on the National Dialogue Session on Indigenous Languages: Abridged Version. Brentwood Bay, BC: First People’s Cultural Council, 2017.
[3] See Gerald Vizenor’s Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1999).