As a break from searching through papers on Google Scholar, I decided to check out Youtube to see if I could come across any videos on indigenous language revitalization in British Columbia. The following video presents groups of First Nation people from Salish Interior Nations who have come together to discuss revitalizing their native languages:
What I learned from this video was that there are 8 Salish Interior Languages which are located in Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Montana and British Columbia. They are:
1. Shuswap
2. Coeur d’Helene
3. Lillooet
4. Thompson River
5. Lakes
6. Columbia Moses
7. Okanagan
8. Flathead
Some important notes that I took from this video were:
- The Salish can better serve their community by creating more speakers and retaining and supporting teachers.
- The aim is to create an Immersion school where community members try to stay with the language all day.
- In a “white man’s” world, you need to go to school (it’s the law – “it’s their law”). However, Indians can go through their whole life talking Indian and learning about everything and the mountains etc.
- The key is for community members to learn the importance of the way of life so that their children can live this way.
- One of the biggest struggles now is that the only way for language education is the “formal” way, not informal (meaning they need to come to school to learn their language – most elders live in rural, hard to reach places which makes passing on the language to the younger generations much more challenging).
- The younger children learn much quicker because they are like “little sponges”. Also, using the communicative approach in the classroom works well and the people learn their language better if they are active in the classroom.
It is great to see that people are working together to create Immersion for the Salish languages. I know that they have a big task ahead of them since the English language is ever so dominant and always there to clash with the traditional languages. However, as long as everyone involved wants it to work, I believe that they can make it work.