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https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/inuit-cultural-genocide-un_a_23716661

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Seated in the United Nations assembly hall, Nunavut's Aluki Kotierk told Indigenous leaders from around the world about the "devastating" loss of traditional languages that continues to plague Canada's Inuit people.

If Inuit languages, collectively known as Inuktut, disappear so too does traditional knowledge and teachings, said Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., an organization that lobbies government to keep promises made to Indigenous people.

This linguicide, a form of cultural genocide, is the result of the federal government's continued investment and promotion of English and French in Nunavut at the expense of Inuktut, especially in schools, Kotierk said Monday at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The UN has declared 2019 the year of Indigenous languages.

"The current education system is failing our Indigenous Arctic children," she said. "Due to the interrelated, interdependent and invisible nature of our rights, such conditions can be devastating."

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Education in mother tongues such as Inuktut is more important than students' socioeconomic conditions when it comes to them succeeding in school, Kotierk said.

In 2019, Canadian Heritage invested 39 times more money in French services than Inuktut services, despite close to 60 per cent of residents citing Inuit languages as their mother tongue, according to data from Nunavut's Office of The Languages Commissioner.

Canadian Heritage dedicated $4.5 million to French language services for 595 French speakers, more than $8,800 per person, and $5.1 million to Indigenous language services. With 22,565 Inuktut speakers, that's about $226 per person.

The Ministry of Canadian Heritage and Multiculturalism recognized Indigenous languages are endangered and disappearing as "a direct consequence of the government's past actions meant to destroy Indigenous cultures," said spokesperson Simon Ross.

Watch: Not all Canadians live in igloos. Story continues below.

Three quarters of the 90 Indigenous languages in Canada are at risk of extinction, according to UNESCO.

The 2019 federal budget committed more than $400 million over five years to revitalize Indigenous languages, said Canadian Heritage. The government has also proposed Bill C-91, an act respecting Indigenous languages.

"This investment is an important next step," Ross said.

Experts say Inuktut use is declining at an alarming rate. York University linguist Ian Martin wrote in a 2017 report that by 2051, only four per cent of Inuit in Nunavut will speak it at home, while English is becoming the predominant language.

Kotierk said this trend demonstrates that colonization in Nunavut continues because loss of Inuktut further separates Inuit from their culture and heritage. For example, in Inuktut there is very specific terminology to describe hunting tools for bowhead whales.

"Language is often the expression of an environment you grew up in, and is intricately intertwined with our culture," she said in an interview.

Kevin Frayer/The Canadian Press

Nunavut Tunngavik commissioned a new report by linguistic researchers and a human rights lawyer, which found none of the territory's 43 schools had adequate bilingual programs for Inuktut and English and only one school provided students access to Inuktut immersion up to Grade 5.

The researchers found that the lack of Inuktut education in Nunavut contradicts domestic laws, including the Inuit Language Protection Act, Nunavut Education Act and Official Languages Act, as well as violates Canada's international commitments.

"The failure of the education system in Nunavut to ensure full written and oral fluency and high levels of competence in the languages of the Inuit arguably compromises the ability of the state to deliver education that is 'culturally appropriate,' to enable children to 'participate effectively' in Nunavut society," the report said, as required under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ratified by Canada.

Nunavut was established 20 years ago, for "Inuit to have a homeland to operate in Inuit culture and with the Inuktut language," said Kotierk. For that to truly be realized, "There needs to be an ideological change in how the government operates."

More from HuffPost Canada:

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Inuit Enduring Cultural Genocide As Languages Disappear, UN Hears

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Seated in the United Nations assembly hall, Nunavut's Aluki Kotierk told Indigenous leaders from around the world about the "devastating" loss of traditional languages that continues to plague Canada's Inuit people. If Inuit languages, collectively known as Inuktut, disappear so too does traditional knowledge and teachings, said Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., an organization that lobbies government to keep promises made to Indigenous people.

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Native languages and language families of North America

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Indigenous languages of Mexico

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A fascinating look at the complex, wonderful array of languages on the African continent!

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Indigenous languages of South America

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Statistics about Australian Aboriginal languages and their rate of disappearance.

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Languages spoken at home

A surprising small number of Aboriginal people speak an Aboriginal language at home.

The remaining percentage covers specific Aboriginal languages and people who did not respond to the Census question.

Multilingual memory masters

Aboriginal people are experts when it comes to language. Before the invasion many were able to speak at least two or three and up to five languages or dialects fluently. Because they had an oral culture they were masters in remembering, contrary to the dominant western culture today who relies on the written word.

"[Aboriginal] language is an important embodiment of cultural heritage, knowledge, tradition and identity unique to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples," says Russell Taylor, Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).

Languages don't just carry information. They also link to land, stories, Dreaming tracks, botanical, medicinal and navigational techniques, and historical experiences of colonialism, racism and prejudice.

For Aboriginal Senior Australian of the Year and Yolngu Elder Laurie Baymarrwangga language carries the essence of Aboriginal culture. "The important thing about language and what it means is that language contains the essence of the ancestors, every word comes from place, and identifies people and links to land, country, the dreaming; they are all inherent in language, therefore it means the people, the land, everything."

Even if language is acquired later in life it can instil a sense of well-being and belonging for many Indigenous people who have lost ties to their culture.

Aboriginal people "often don't even know that [their mother] language is still strong and people speak it. When we show that to them it just blows their mind," says Ken Walker, NSW North Coast Gumbaynggirr Aboriginal language teacher.

Aboriginal language groups

Language groups such as Yolnu Matha ("the people's tongue") are not languages. Under the Yolŋu Matha family of languages, there are between 48 and 60 languages.

When considering Aboriginal language groups, note that Aboriginal people have moved inter-state, voluntarily or not. An Aboriginal person living in a particular state may not be from that state originally.

For example, if an Aboriginal person originally from Western Australia is now living in NSW, they would still consider themselves to be a Nyungar/Nyoongar rather than a Koori.

Traditional hand signs & sign language

You'll be quick to agree that when Aboriginal people were out hunting they couldn't just call out to each other-it would have scared away their game. So they used an intricate sign language to signal to each other.

But hand signs were not only used for hunting. Uses of sign language were very varied:

Mourning. During extended periods of mourning women (but not men) of the Warumungu and Warlpiri used signs instead of speech, sometimes for longer than a year. Speech was also culturally forbidden during periods of mourning for the Yolŋu people of North East Arnhem Land.

Ceremony. During certain ceremonies speaking might be forbidden.

Long-distance communication. Sign language is used when communicating over a large distance as talking out loud is considered inappropriate. Using sign language during hunting would also fall into this category.

Confidential or secret information. When trying to avoid being overheard sign language is also used. I've experienced this first-hand when I was travelling with a backpack with an Aboriginal flag on it. In a restaurant, I could see a young couple gesticulating with each other while looking at my backpack.

Sacred information. When referring to ceremonial issues, objects and sites Aboriginal people use sign language to codify or obscure the restricted information.

Adding emphasis. Sign language is also used to add emphasis to verbal speech (which many non-Aboriginal people do as well).

Wrong skin. Yolŋu people are not allowed to talk in the company of "poison kin", people of a different group where cultural protocols dictate that they cannot talk to them.

In the Western Desert areas men use sign language more than women, mainly ceremonially in initiation rituals or during hunting.

Sign languages have been used throughout the dry inner Australian areas as well as in northeast Arnhem Land and western Cape York.

Most sign languages studied were found to be closely related to the spoken language, thus foreign to other Aboriginal nations.

Adam Kendon is considered an expert in this area with his stellar work Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia.

Hand signs are considered one of two competing ideas about how early humans developed language. In an experiment with university students, who were not allowed to use language, they became fluent very quickly in a sign language they developed, rather than the use of vocalisations.

Clifton Bieundurry explains more about the many uses of sign language in the following video.

Case study: Yolŋu Sign Language

Yolŋu Sign Language (YSL) is an endangered sign language of the Yolŋu people of North East Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.

YSL is the primary language of Yolŋu who are deaf, but not a signed version of the locally spoken language. It is an alternate language for those capable of hearing. Linguists refer to this as "multilingual bimodalism of alternate sign languages", and label people who can communicate in both spoken and signed languages as "bimodal-bilingual". It is quite common among Aboriginal nations.

70 signs of YSL, first documented in 1929, are still in use today.

A book, The Illustrated Handbook of Yolŋu Sign Language of North East Arnhem Land, aims to teach YSL to young children in an effort to preserve this language.

Have you ever listened to Aboriginal language?

Many people, even many Australians, have never listened to Aboriginal language.

Here's a video where Taliah King sings the Australian anthem in Dharawal language (recorded at the Reconciliation ceremony in Shellharbour City in 2013):

Aboriginal language: When yes means no

Sometimes people say 'no' when they mean 'yes'. But it might surprise that many Aboriginal people say 'yes' and mean 'no'.

Research uncovered that Aboriginal people often answer 'yes' to advances by salespeople to appease the salesperson and politely end the conversation. Salespeople however took their 'yes' as agreement and sealed the contract with dire consequences.

Hundreds of Aboriginal people entered unintentionally into exploitative, unfair contracts to buy, lease or lay-by products and services they can't afford and don't understand. The North Queensland-based Indigenous Consumer Assistance Network (ICAN) cancelled more than 800 contracts, preventing an estimated $2 million of financial detriment, which they consider the "tip of the iceberg".

Similarly, Aboriginal people "agree" in everyday conversations with non-Indigenous people. They try to politely tell the person that they do not want or can't answer their questions or request because they haven't built enough trust yet or it is not their call to reveal the answers.

Resources

If you are interested in researching Aboriginal languages check out the following websites.

Gambay - First Languages map

First Languages Australia has developed a map of Australia's first languages and language families that reflects the names and groupings favoured by Aboriginal communities.

You can search by language or town and share the information about each language. Videos illustrate languages or give samples. The site allows language centres and communities to update information as needed.

Dharug Dalang

Dharug Dalang is a site launched in October 2010. It features hundreds of words, some of which are read out to you so you can learn their pronunciation.

The site has also background information and video interviews about language of Aboriginal people.

Check it out: www.dharug.dalang.com.au.

Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages

This open access archive from the Charles Darwin University contains more than 3,600 items of authentic texts in 50 Aboriginal languages of the Northern Territory, many with English translations and illustrations, and all available to read or download for free. The materials cover a vast array of topics, from traditional stories, ethnobiology, history, bush food and medicine, tales of contemporary life, and translations of English stories.

Visit the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages.

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (IATSIS)

IATSIS' Australian Indigenous languages database AUSTLANG allows you to search for Aboriginal languages by name, place name or by navigating Australia through Google Maps.

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A surprising small number of Aboriginal people speak an Aboriginal language at home. The remaining percentage covers specific Aboriginal languages and people who did not respond to the Census question. Aboriginal people are experts when it comes to language. Before the invasion many were able to speak at least two or three and up to five languages or dialects fluently.

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Graeme McKay's poignant political cartoon about indigenous children in Canada losing their cultural identity at the hands of the Canadian Indian Residential School System.

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National Geographic explores the loss of languages around the globe, including the language of Gottscheerisch.

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On a residential block at the border between Brooklyn and Queens, Gottscheer Hall appears like a mirage from 1945.

Blue awnings advertise the space for weddings and events. Inside, an entryway is covered with the saccharin smiles of "Miss Gottschee" contestants from decades past. "Back then you had to know the language to compete," says 92-year-old Alfred Belay, pointing out his daughter's beaming face from the 1980s. Nowadays, there are years with only a single contestant in the pageant.

Belay has been coming to Gottscheer Hall since he arrived in America more than 60 years ago. Then, the neighborhood was filled with refugees from Gottschee, a settlement that once occupied the highlands of modern-day Slovenia. Now, he's one of a few thousand remaining speakers of its language, Gottscheerisch. Every Christmas he leads a service in his 600-year-old native language that few understand.

"Imagine if someone who plays music suddenly can't use their fingers," he says. "We're still alive but can only remember these things."

Belay and his sister, 83-year-old Martha Hutter, have agreed to let 26-year-old Daniel Bogre Udell film them having a conversation. They walk past the dark wood bar of Gottscheer Hall serving pretzels and sausages, and they climb the stairs to an empty banquet room. Bogre Udell sets up his camera and the siblings begin to banter in their inscrutable Germanic mother tongue.

Slip of the Tongue

Hearing such a rare language spoken on a residential block of Queens is not unusual for Bogre Udell, the co-founder of a nonprofit called Wikitongues. There are some 800 languages spoken within the 10-mile radius of New York City, which is more than 10 percent of the world's estimated 7,099 languages. Since he has decided to record all of them, the melting-pot metropolis is a natural launching point.

Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. In 2014, they launched an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. They've already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online, and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years.

"When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions," says Bogre Udell. "Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?"

Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century.

( Read about what happens when a language dies.)

In rare cases, political will and a thorough written record can resurrect a lost language. Hebrew was extinct from the fourth century BC to the 1800s, and Catalan only bloomed during a government transition in the 1970s. In 2001, more than 40 years after the last native speaker died, the language of Oklahoma's Miami tribe started being learned by students at Miami University in Ohio. The internet has connected rare language speakers with each other and with researchers. Even texting has helped formalize languages that don't have a set writing system.

Knowing they wouldn't be able to record, or even locate, the majority of these languages themselves, Wikitongues has enlisted a network of volunteers in 40 countries to film native speakers talking in the past, present, and future tenses of their mother tongue. To get a range of tones and emotions, they're asked to reminisce about childhood, talk about romance, and discuss their hopes and goals.

One volunteer in the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu recorded a language that had never before been studied by linguists. Another tracked down a speaker of Ainu, a rare indigenous language in Japan that is an " isolate," meaning it bears no relation to any other known language.

Wikitongues isn't the only initiative working to document rare languages. National Geographic Society's Enduring Voices project supported the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in their effort to build Talking Dictionaries comprised of definitions, audio files, and images. Someone looking to learn Tuvan, a Turkic language spoken in Siberia, can download the app to their phone.

Starting this year, Wikitongue's collections will be stored at the American Folklife Center through a partnership with the Library of Congress. But their goals stretch past documentation-the founders also plan to provide a way to learn languages long after they've gone extinct. An app they're building called Poly allows people to create language dictionaries using text, audio, and video.

Priceless documentation opportunities disappear regularly. Not long ago, one of the last two speakers of a Saami language dialect in the Russian steppes died right before his recording session with Wikitongues. Some 500 languages could slip through their grasp in the next five years, they estimate.

Political persecution, a lack of preservation, and globalization are to blame for the dwindling language diversity. For much of the 20th century, governments across the world have imposed language on indigenous people, often through coercion. Some 100 aboriginal languages in Australia have disappeared since European settlers arrived. A half-century after China annexed Tibet, dozens of distinct dialects with unique alphabets are on the verge of extinction. Studies have shown that suppressing language impairs everything from health to school performance.

This forced suppression, however, is no longer the biggest threat facing our linguistic ecosystem. "Most languages die today not because of abject and outright persecution-though this does happen on occasion-but rather because they are made unviable," says Andrade. Factors like climate change and urbanization force linguistically diverse rural and coastal communities to migrate and assimilate to new communities with new languages.

"This form of language loss is a cancer, not a gunshot."

For Future Generations

In Gottscheer Hall, Belay and Hutter transform as they chatter for Daniel Bogre Udell's video camera. At one point Hutter breaks into song. In Gottscheerisch, they recall growing up in a single bedroom home where they spoke Gottscheerisch-German was used for school and church.

In 1941, Gottschee was annexed by the Italians and its residents were sent to resettlement camps. Four years later, the Gottscheer Relief Association opened its doors to the thousands of immigrants arriving in New York. By the time Belay and Hutter arrived, in the 1950s, the neighborhood was so full of immigrants that Hutter was barely able to practice her English.

The newcomers spoke Gottscheerisch to each other and raised their kids with English. Now, 60 years later, Belay has started speaking to his kids in Gottscheerisch for the first time, but the language is on the brink of extinction.

As a street language, Gottscheerisch was rarely written down. It could only be learned by ear until 1994, when Hutter published a five-year effort collecting definitions for 1,400 words: the first English-Gottscheerisch dictionary.

"The old Gottscheers were convinced that nobody can learn Gottscheerisch, so they didn't try to teach it," Hutter recalls. "But any language can be learned, so I thought, 'This old language is going to die and they won't know anything.'"

"We did the same thing," Belay interjects. "Our kids could have learned it."

"There is a time in the future when families won't speak it," says Hutter. "When they'll say, 'Our family spoke- what was it?'"

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Saving the World's Dying and Disappearing Languages

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Every two weeks a language dies. Wikitongues wants to save them.

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Efforts to revitalize endangered languages of indigenous Wisconsin nations are explored.

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For Rosa Francour and other educators who are revitalizing Indigenous languages in Wisconsin, their work is about more than teaching people to use different words to communicate.

Language is at the core of what it means to be Oneida, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Mohican, Potawatomi or Ojibwe, as the phrases and sentences consistently reinforce an Indigenous way of thinking and looking at the world, Francour and others say.

Language is about identity as a people, and it had been nearly completely taken away through forced assimilation, especially at the infamous boarding schools in the late 19th century to mid-20th century where Indigenous children were beaten and punished for speaking their native tongue.

Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children in the U.S. were forcibly, or voluntarily in some instances, removed from their homes to attend one of 350 government-funded boarding schools across 30 states "to implement cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children," according to the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

Many children were physically and sexually abused, and elders in the U.S. and Canada still talk about the horrors they endured. People were reminded of that horror recently when a mass grave of 215 children was found on the site of a former boarding school in Canada.

Advocates talk about the generational trauma Indigenous people are still experiencing from the boarding schools with one effect being the loss of language.

It wasn't until the 1990s that teaching Indigenous language once again became legal in the U.S. with the passage of the Native American Languages Act, which repudiated past government policies of eradicating American Indian languages.

"We're still feeling the effects of that today," Francour said. "We're trying to address the stigma."

Indigenous government and grassroots programs have been trying since - with limited success - to reach higher levels of proficiency in many tribes, as there are fewer and fewer first-language speakers.

Oneida

"A major challenge, and there are a number of them, is the dominance of the English language," said Francour, who is an educator with the Oneida Nation's Tehatiw^nakhwa Language Nest Immersion Program. "It's all around us."

She said there is only one remaining Oneida first-language speaker from the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin, a man in his 60s, but there are about a dozen people who have achieved a high level of proficiency so far, including another man in his 60s who is fluent in Oneida as a second language.

The Oneida in Wisconsin are one of three Oneida tribal nations with one in New York and another in Canada, and Francour said the Oneida in Canada have a lot more proficient Oneida speakers and some are helping the Oneida in Wisconsin relearn.

The Oneida immersion program in Wisconsin is designed to counter that English dominance by fully immersing children as young as 3 years old with the Oneida language.

"We only use our language in the classroom," Francour said.

Three years into the program, she said there have been good results.

Before the immersion program, Francour in 2014 helped start an Oneida language course at Pulaski High School, where many Oneida students attend.

That program still exists, but Francour said educational policies statewide and nationally tend to focus more effort and funding on areas other than second language learning, such as the STEM field (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

But the Oneida Nation is renewing its efforts locally, especially after the overwhelming passage of a referendum last year asking Oneida voters if they would support a widespread, long-range Oneida language initiative.

Part of the charge from that referendum is to create a comprehensive plan linking all the Oneida language programs together that Francour said they are still in the process of putting together.

"Knowing the language really gives us a sense of who we are and where we come from," she said. "It's what makes us Oneida."

That's because the language's focus on verbs or the actions one does differs from the English focus on the subject, which emphasizes a Westernized individualistic worldview.

"I just think of everything in Oneida as opposite from the English worldview," Francour said.

She said the Oneida language also tends to focus on "we" and "us" and plays a large role in understanding Oneida ceremonies, arts and even in how to raise a family.

Another example in which knowing the Oneida language plays a vital role is understanding the concept of the Three Sisters garden, Francour said.

This is a traditional garden for many Native American people in which squash, corn and beans work together in a symbiotic relationship to help each other grow and protect each other from certain insects.

A Western way of thinking separates humans from the natural environment, whereas an Indigenous way of thinking has humans working in symbiosis with the natural environment for mutual benefit, and that's reflected in the language.

Francour said she's encouraged more Oneida people are becoming aware of the state of their language and why it's important to revitalize it.

"That makes me hopeful in what we can achieve," she said.

Ojibwe (Lac Courte Oreilles)

Like the Oneida, the Ojibwe language is essential to be used in ceremonies, songs and other rituals vital to the culture, according to Michael Sullivan, a linguistics instructor at the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) Ojibwe School in Hayward.

He said they are down to three first-language Ojibwe speakers remaining in the LCO community and they are working against the clock documenting as much of the language as they can from their last generation of Native speakers.

"Rather than dwell on loss, we celebrate the fact that we have over 100 children on our reservation that speak our language highly proficiently as the result of our immersion efforts," Sullivan said. "We haven't been able to say that in over 70 years in our community."

Ojibwe bands have reservations throughout northern portions of several states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and North Dakota, as well as nearby areas in southern Canada. Six Ojibwe nations are in Wisconsin.

Sullivan estimates only about 300 first-language Ojibwe speakers are in the U.S., but about 10,000 are in Canada, mostly in the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba.

Thanks to immersion programs, such as LCO's Waadookodaading, and language courses at colleges and university close to Ojibwe communities, there is much promise in the number of people learning Ojibwe as a second language.

"Ojibwe is the widest-taught North America Indigenous language," Sullivan said. "There are a growing number of other immersion schools and programs emerging across the vast territory in which Ojibwe is spoken."

The LCO community is having the most success in teaching Ojibwe as a second language, according to Sullivan.

"In addition to the kids, we boast the highest number of second-language Ojibwe speakers anywhere in the United States," he said. "A number of elders from neighboring communities are also involved in our work."

Ho-Chunk

Fewer than 50 first-language Ho-Chunk speakers remain in the world, but like other tribes in Wisconsin, there has been a lot of success in teaching as a second language.

"For me, the language is at the heart of our culture and our people," said Henning Garvin, language program manager for the Ho-Chunk Nation. "The very name of our people refers our language, People of the Sacred Voice, and stems from our creation story when Hoocąk was first given to us."

This year, tribal officials are working with the Wisconsin Library System to make written, audio and visual materials detailing the Ho-Chunk language accessible in an interactive content management system called Mukurtu.

The program was developed in 2007 at Washington State University and is designed for digitally preserving the history, language and culture of Indigenous nations.

Its first project was archiving the records of the Warumungu community in Australia. The name Mukurtu is a Warumungu word meaning "dilly bag," or a safe keeping place for sacred materials.

"One of the things that can be done within the program is to create specific collections where a curator can pick amongst all of the digital material that is available to create a smaller subset relevant to whatever they wish to convey to an audience," Garvin said.

For example, the Ho-Chunk word for basket, Nąąpą, may be linked to pictures of black ash baskets from the museum collections, videos or stories about basketry and a datasheet about the emerald ash borer infestation, which threatens the art form.

The platform can also include an online dictionary that can be added to while being sensitive to tribal needs. Some knowledge and wisdom can be shared with everyone while other information is meant only for certain clans.

"It also gives us control as to how we share the information ... where we have complete control over the how and the who, decisions we make with the guidance of our elders," Garvin said.

With a $342,000 grant to fund the project from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mukurtu hub manager Erin Hughes said the plan after working a year with the Ho-Chunk Nation is to work with the Menominee Nation for its second year of the project and a still-to-be-determined Indigenous nation in Wisconsin for its third year.

"Languages encapsulate much of the culture they come from and exist as one of the roots of identity and to maintain our sovereignty," Garvin said. "So to maintain our identity and to maintain our sovereignty, I think it is vital and necessary that we maintain our language."

Frank Vaisvilas is a corps member based at the Green Bay Press-Gazette covering Native American issues in Wisconsin. He can be reached at 920-228-0437 or fvaisvilas@gannett.com, or on Twitter at Report For America@vaisvilas_frank. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to this reporting effort at GreenBayPressGazette.com/RFA.

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Indigenous languages being revitalized in Wisconsin in efforts to reclaim, maintain identity

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For Rosa Francour and other educators who are revitalizing Indigenous languages in Wisconsin, their work is about more than teaching people to use different words to communicate. Language is at the core of what it means to be Oneida, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Mohican, Potawatomi or Ojibwe, as the phrases and sentences consistently reinforce an Indigenous way of thinking and looking at the world, Francour and others say.

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Both Not Half: How language shapes identity | Jassa Ahluwalia | TEDxChandigarh