SIX NATIONS OF THE GRAND RIVER, Ontario — When Brian Maracle returned to the Mohawk community near Toronto, which he left when he was only 5, in his mid-40s, he had no job and knew almost no one there.
But perhaps his greatest challenge was that he neither spoke nor understood Kanyen’keha, the Mohawk language. More than a century of Canadian government attempts to eradicate Indigenous cultures had left Mr. Maracle and many other Indigenous peoples without their language.
Now, 30 years later, Mr. Maracle has become a champion of Mohawk and is helping to revitalize it and other Indigenous languages in Canada and elsewhere through his shift in teaching methods.
“I never studied linguistics, have no teacher training, my parents weren’t speakers,” he said in his office at an adult language school he founded about two decades ago in his community, the Six Nations of the Grand River, southwest of Toronto. But he is now a speaker at academic linguistics conferences.
Innovative approaches like Mr. Maracle’s are crucial, experts say, to overcoming the oppression of indigenous languages and cultures in Canada.
From the 19th century through the 1990s, thousands of Indigenous students were taken from their homes, sometimes violently, and placed in Canada’s boarding school system. There they were forbidden to speak their language and practice their traditions, which a national commission later described as “cultural genocide.”
The system did not completely eradicate indigenous languages, but its impact was devastating nonetheless the 60 indigenous languages of Canada.
Today, restoring indigenous languages is part of Canada’s drive for reconciliation with its indigenous peoples, a top priority for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration. Four years ago, the government passed the Indigenous Languages Actwhich officially recognizes the importance of these languages and is demanding the allocation of funds – so far more than 700 million Canadian dollars – for the teaching.
But none of that existed when Mr. Maracle arrived at Six Nations, and the program available, he felt, was unsuitable for adult students.
“Indigenous languages are very different from English,” said Ivona Kucerova, director of the Center for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “But what you usually see is that local indigenous language teaching methods are designed to teach Western languages.”
Mr Maracle said the problem with his first unsuccessful lesson was that the instructors, generally Mohawk elders with no language teaching training, would throw away “whole words”.
“You just expected them to figure it out somehow by dropping a word on you and saying it louder,” said Mr. Maracle. “They didn’t understand how the language really works.”
A small grant enabled Mr. Maracle and three other Six Nations people to try to determine exactly what this structure was.
Mr. Maracle found the answer some 25 years ago in the office of David Kanatawakhon-Maracle, no direct relative, a professor at Western University in London, Ontario.
“There were little scraps of paper all over that big table,” Mr. Maracle recalled. The lecturer said the words to Mr. Maracle he had been longing for: “He said, ‘I think I have a new way of teaching the language.'”
There were about 60 pieces of paper on his office desk, and they “were the Rosetta Stone of everything it takes to be a competent beginning public speaker,” said Mr. Maracle.
Kanyen’keha is a polysynthetic language in which a single word can function as a complete sentence. These words are made up of morphemes, small elements that change meaning depending on how they are combined.
The slips contained the morphemes that are the building blocks for all language.
“That was huge,” said Mr. Maracle.
Understanding that these elements were key to unlocking the language was the breakthrough Mr. Maracle needed to become fluent. But other students at the school he helped found in 1999 were still struggling. It became apparent that someone needed to build a syllabus and curriculum around the morphemes, including a color-coded system for grouping them, which Mr. Maracle did by trial and error.
A key discovery was the realization that learning Kanyen’keha requires “looking at the world through the eyes of the Mohawk language,” he said.
Compared to other languages, Kanyen’keha relies heavily on verbs. Objects are generally described by what they do. For example, the word for “computer” roughly translates to “it brings things to light.”
Therefore, Mr. Maracle said, its speakers must analyze the world in terms of actions rather than objects.
“We don’t teach you how to say ‘pencil’, ‘chair’ or ‘shoe’ for six months,” said Mr. Maracle. “Because the language is a verb-based language, the names of things are grammatically less important.”
Professor Kucerova, the director of the Linguistics Center in Hamilton, considers Mr. Maracle a linguist despite his lack of formal training. She said tests showed his students emerged with college-level fluency in two years.
“I’ve never seen anyone take adult learners to that level to be able to speak at that level after two years,” she said, adding that Mohawk ranks par with Arabic in terms of difficulty for English-speaking students. “This is really amazing.”
“I was literally mesmerized by the scope of his work,” said Prof. Kucerova. “He devised this unlikely, but linguistically astute method of teaching this radically different language to adults.”
Born in Detroit, Mr. Maracle spent most of his first five years with Six Nations, but later lived in Buffalo and Rochester in New York and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario during his childhood years as his father, a carpenter , moved to work.
After graduating from Dartmouth College, he studied journalism and worked as a reporter for The Globe and Mail newspaper. He was also the host of an Indigenous radio program for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before returning to Six Nations.
Mr. Maracle, 76, recently retired from the language school he founded – Onkwawna Kentyohkwaor Our Language Society – but he remains active in a number of their programs.
The school has its offices in an Indigenous community service building in the village of Ohsweken, Ontario, the administrative center of the sprawling First Nation. It can afford to only accept about a dozen students a year; The first federal grants did not arrive until 2021. Before that, it was largely funded by the municipality.
There are no specific figures on current Kanyen’keha speakers in the area, but the local branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, Canada’s largest financial institution, now has signs in Kanyen’keha and staff who speak the language. Signs in the community language warn motorists not to text and drive.
Among the school’s students was Marc Miller, the current federal minister for Indigenous Relations, who, after some part-time studies, became the first lawmaker to have his say Canada’s parliament in an indigenous language since Confederation 1867.
Mr Maracle said the key difference he saw was that Kanyen’keha was no longer spoken only by older people, but was used more frequently by young people at home, with their immediate families and in everyday situations.
“I think people are finally realizing that public schools and technology aren’t going to save our languages,” he said, adding, “You have to enable young adults to become speakers so that they’re raising children as a first language.” can speakers.”
