Hello everyone,

As a think back on my own childhood, I remember all of the lazy summer months spent on Little Shuswap Lake with my family.  I never would have thought that 40 years later I would be interested in researching this area again, wanting to know more about the Shuswap people who own the land that our cabins were on. When I was doing my reading for ETEC 521 this week, I smiled when I dicovered in the article by (Hare, 2011), that there was Shuswap (Secwepemctsin) Immersion going on in an elementary school on the Adams Lake reserve. Located near Chase B.C., (next to my summer stomping grounds), Chief Atahm Elementary school is running Secwepemctsin Immersion (no English until grade 5).  I was immediately intrigued.  As a French Immersion, Spanish and Music teacher myself, I am very interested in the transmission of language.  I’m looking at doing my research in this area and I’m also looking into the former residential school system and how it affected (almost destroyed) several generations when it came to the transmission of aboriginal languages.

Now many of the 34 First Nation languages spoken in B.C. are endangered since only 4 dozen people speak them fluently and many are elderly.  In this article about the Chief Atahm Elementary School, it talks about parents (who were unfortunate victims of the residential schools themselves), who spoke the Shuswap language fluently themselves but didn’t want to teach it to their child in fear that they wouldn’t be accepted in universities.  Now their children and grandchildren want to regain their identity and learn the language and traditions in a school which is run entirely by the Shuswap teachers and parents.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2011/09/06/Chief-Atahm-Elementary-School

Reference

Hare, J. (2011). Learning from Indigenous knowledge in education. In D. Long and O. P. Dickenson (Eds.), Visions of the heart, 3rd Edition (pp. 91-112). Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press.