Numerous Indigenous activists and academics have argued the importance of language preservation and language learning in cultural revitalization for tribal peoples (see Baker-Williams, 2000 for a literature review and discussion of language revitalization an its role in decolonization) . As a Cree woman who knows scarcely twenty-five words in my native language, I have a strong desire to learn the language my father spoke fluently but did not teach to me. Living in Vancouver, with no direct contact with family members who speak Cree, I have found creative and engaging ways to use social media in my language learning pursuits. Specifically, I have added many counts to this Youtube posting of a Cree language song by Carl Quinn, which has the lyrics posted as a notation to the video:
When I listen to this song, I look at the words and try to experience the sound of the language: the pronunciation of the words and the intonation and patterns. I learned that the word “nipin” means “summer” in Cree, increasing my vocabulary by one word – and when you know only 25 words, that’s a pretty big increase! I do recognize, however, that the transcription provided may have errors and that I cannot rely on this for a completely accurate record of the words in the song… I don’t even know for certain whether the singer is fluent himself. So, there are limitations, but I see it as a starting place for learning.
Another language learning project that I learned of through the CBC podcast with Duncan McCue was a Squamish language blog and podcast maintained by a young Squamish man named Dustin Rivers. Using social media tools, Dustin is embarking on a language revitalization project and one of his target audiences is youth. In the podcast, he talks about technology tools as “avenues to reclaim or identity, reclaim our language, reclaim our little place in this world that gives us a sense of pride, strength and encouragement.” Youth learning the Skwxwú7mesh language are using text messages to bring the language back to life. Dustin’s blog and podcasts provide a self-published platform to share his knowledge with others, no matter whether they live in their traditional territory, or they have moved further away.
Without a body of research to back up my hypothesis, I believe that social media offers a unique platform for Indigenous language learning and preservation that has not existed since pre-contact times. We may not live in tribal groups and learn language from infancy, but social media provides a non-print medium to broadly share and create and share again. The saying goes that once something is on the internet it is “out there in cyberspace” forever, which means that an Indigenous language that has been shared on Youtube or published with as sound file on a blog can never die completely: there will always be a record and there will be opportunities for those who seek this knowledge to find it.