Answering question 3 

In considering Edward Chamberlin’s ruminations on language in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, I thought of Tuscarora author Alicia Elliott and her essay collection A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, an examination of transgenerational trauma and colonialism through which Elliot hopes people “think more critically about how they got to where they are” (Elliott 2019). The original essay‘s central concern is the extraordinary power of words and the ways in which the destruction of Indigenous languages contributes to intergenerational Indigenous trauma. Elliott notes that in Indigenous communities where over half of residents speak their native language, rates of suicide are lower (Elliott 252), concluding that “culture lives and breathes inside our languages” (253). She receives her data from the Centre for Suicide Prevention, which labels suicide as the leading cause of death for Indigenous youths and adults up to age forty-four (“Suicide Prevention Resource Toolkit”). We can look further to a primary source referenced by this Toolkit to examine how “any threat to the persistence of personal or cultural identity poses a counterpart threat to individual or community wellbeing” (Hallet et al. 392), with “the demise of the most endangered of Canada’s indigenous languages” (Hallet et al. 392) itself a threat to this persistence of identity. It is thus clear that language and words, through their allowing us to form diverse modes of communication and impart stories, assist in the shaping of identity and community.

Both Chamberlin and, to a lesser extent, Elliott, concern themselves with the differences, or lack thereof, between signifier and signified – between words and their meanings, between “learning to recognize the difference between a bear and the word ‘bear’,” (Chamberlin 132). Indeed, Chamberlin writes of “rhythms and melodies and meanings” as helping people “understand both the earth they live on and their place in the greater scheme of things” (125). Languages and their stories shape culture and community and reveal where people “came from, and why they are here” (Chamberlin 2). A language is the bedrock of a community, and it is through these communal expressions of words and meanings that these diverse truths develop.

Less than one percent of Canada’s population, around 260,550 individuals, speak an Indigenous language (Coles 2018). With this threat comes the continued loss of Indigenous culture, community, and history. In his examination of the destruction of Tibet’s minority languages, anthropologist Gerald Roche writes of the destructiveness of “language oppression,” how “certain populations and their languages are systematically rendered discursively invisible” (487). The original 1947 draft of the United Nations Genocide Convention laid out five distinct markers of a cultural form of genocide, the third of which was the “prohibition of the use of the national language even in private intercourse” (MacDonald and Hudson 443). Political scientists David B. MacDonald and Graham Hudson later conclude that “there seems to be clear evidence of intention to commit cultural genocide” towards Canada’s Indigenous peoples, partly through “forcible assimilation, including denigration of traditional languages” (445). Through the forced invisibilization of native language comes the inability for Canada’s First Nations to express their cultures and their stories and thus maintain community.

The erasure of Indigenous languages brings with it the erasure of Indigenous communities and their stories: consider esteemed professor Hilde Lindemann and her work on counterstory, which in a 2014 lecture at St. Thomas University she defined as “a story that is told for the purpose of resisting a socially shared narrative that purports to justify the oppression of a social group” (Lindemann 2014). These “socially shared narratives,” or master narratives, “enter the tissue of stories that constitute the group’s identity, damaging that identity” (Lindemann 2014), and so commit an institutionalized form of propagandistic oppression upon said group identity. In If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, Chamberlin is examining the push and pull of counter-narratives against the master narratives that, through their language and truthtelling, they seek to oppose.

Is Elliott’s essay a counter-narrative? Perhaps so, with its spotlighting of the struggles of a marginalized community – and yet how could Elliott ever hope to oppose oppression when “both depression and colonialism have stolen (her) language” (53)? If, as Chamberlin so eloquently tells us, language is the foundation of truthtelling and culture, how can Elliott properly counter the dominant master narratives oppressing her people if she cannot narrate in her people’s language? She works in the language of her colonizers – the words, rhymes, and rhythms of the master narrative. What truth, what identity, is stripped from her narrative in that loss of language? The world of words is complex and often contradictory – the riddles of language shape meaning. “The word’s the thing and…it is not the thing,” writes Chamberlin (132): language is vital to identity and community, truth and history, yet simultaneously we must understand there to be a disconnect between words and the world. In “Orality about Literacy,” an examination of oral vs. literary forms of communication and narrative with a particular focus on the stories of the Salish peoples, Professor Keith Thor Carlson writes of literacy both as “a colonial ‘weapon capable of inflicting damage'” and a “Western tool sometimes employed by Aboriginal people to preserve their cultural and traditions against colonial assimilation” (43); thus, the written word is malleable, subject to recontextualization to suit the needs of various causes, from colonialist dominance to the formation of counter-identity. The same words that have oppressed her people now allow Elliott to reclaim, and make public, her story and her Indegeinity – however limiting that reclamation may be. Words are never set, never final, and so the cat, as writes Chamberlin, “is both there and not there” (132).

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Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Vintage Canada, 2004.

Coles, Terri. “Indigenous Languages Are In Danger Of Becoming Extinct – Here’s How You Can Help Save Them.” HuffPost, 21 June 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/06/21/indigenous-languages_a_23465069/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA4s6oNfKWa3YvYAXC8CVJF1UnsTpAChazfckipHo8lMvGjADri7Hk7LnkMjMURsyU9N0OQUAmz37Js4PN0ZrJ4VtUZTEw7xlpETLfqe2uhPiL0P5wJIT0G9oqhI8fIczwKvNrEH9X6idcQPdHGLX-TfcYvlOzNE_-C6UPdQecfR. Accessed 22 January 2021.

Elliott, Alicia. “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.” CBC Books, 25 January 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/books/a-mind-spread-out-on-the-ground-1.4930281. Accessed 22 January 2021.

—. “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.” The Malahat Review, 2016, pp. 47-54, http://www.malahatreview.ca/excerpts/197files/elliott.pdf. Accessed 22 January 2021.

Hallet, Darcy, et al. “Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide.” Cognitive Development, vol. 22, pp. 392-399. Science Direct, http://web.uvic.ca/~lalonde/manuscripts/2007CogDevt.pdf.

“Indigenous Suicide Prevention.” Centre for Suicide Prevention, https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/indigenous-suicide-prevention/. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality About Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines, edited by Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson, University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 43-72, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2020wc/files/2020/02/Orality-and-Literature-.pdf.

Lindemann, Hilde. “How to Counter a Counterstory (and Keep Those People in Their Place).” YouTube, uploaded by etcjournals, 6 July 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzNqq1_DDck. Accessed 22 January 2021.

MacDonald, David B., and Graham Hudson. “The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne De Science Politique, vol. 45, no. 2, 2012, pp. 427–449. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23320978. Accessed 22 Jan. 2021.

Roche, Gerald. “Articulating language oppression: colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 487-514. Taylor and Francis Online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1662074?needAccess=true.