A particularity of the Algonquin language family, which includes the native speaker's first language, is that they mark words as either animate or inanimate, which is different from other languages where they assign a gender to words like French, Spanish, or German. For example, animated words are people, animals, plants, and rocks (!), which tells a lot about how the speaker understands and relates to the world around them.

For hundreds of years, the state fought actively to get rid of Indigenous languages, like the quote at 5:01. In residential schools, a doctor studying tuberculosis found out that up to 25% of the Indigenous children there were affected by the illness. The last residential school closed 15 years ago, in 1996.

She talks about the measures the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada) took to help "recover" from the trauma that was caused from the schools. When the United Nations Declaration on the rights on Indigenous People took place in 2007, four countries refused to sign: the US, New-Zealand, Australia and Canada.

The Micmac language has undergone significant revitalization because of the adoption of a self-government agreement, where education was based around language and culture. Children speak it as their first language. There are also a Language Nest that took place in her community, where they pass the language to children through traditional activities.

To survive, Indigenous Languages in Canada need policies to ensure that they are integrated to the education system, on and off reserve ( where 70% of the population lives). They also need support: financial, but also physical; they need space to practice the activities, and they need people who are passionate about their culture.

"my water" and the other members of her community gave her weird looks. She explains that the concept of ownership was forced into her culture for survival, and she used to word "Sewkw" (water) to illustrate the evolution of some words, as "sew" means to ask for, and "kw" means liquid; they had to ask the owner of the land if they could take some water before using it.

end of the century. He created the app after he tried many ways to make his daughter learn Ojibwe. He saw how incredible her progress was, and decided after to release the app for free in the app store. He had a reflection one day on how the code he used to create the app could be useful for other tribes as well, so he distributed the code online for free. Many tribes from all around the world started to use it (40 000 downloads), which resulted in the creation of more than 60 language apps. He got calls from people speaking an endangered language all over the world thanking him, as some of them only had 2-3 speakers left, and they were elders. Darrick's story shows how technology can save a language through apps and interactive learning.

community? "Should an orthography be maximally distanced from that of the language of wider communication for ideological reasons, or should its main principles coincide for reasons of learnability? Which local variety should be selected as the basis of a common script? Is a multilateral script preferable to a standardized orthography? And can creating an orthography create problems for existing native speakers? " This book contains many interesting articles on how to make a language literate.

He had to learn English as all the other fluent members of his community passed away. He eventually started giving classes on the Nakota Language to other members on his community. That required him to adapt his language to literature in order to teach it to his students, who speak english. We see on the little white board of the classroom that the sentence structure in Nakota is SOV (subject- object- verb). It is also a language that uses a lot of gestures, as he mimics the words he teaches to the students. We can also see that there are non-Indigenous students in his class as well. This movie is really emotional and shows the reality of people like Armand, trying to save their cultures. LINK

The movie is named after his white elementary school teacher told him when he was 7: "Indians may be red on the outside, but they are white on the inside, just like the rest of us". That statement led Lorne to "assimilate" himself to fit in with the other kids, to later realizing that he is not feeling like himself in the "white identity". He goes back to his roots and really connects with his Native Identity. Something I really appreciated about this film is the fact that the author narrates it, which makes the story more relatable and personal. The movie is also humorous, as he makes many jokes and pokes fun at the "Indian stereotypes". He also ends the video by saying "Apples are good for you!", which shows that he is at peace with his current identity.

I think that this interview is interesting, even though it does not discuss the situation in Canada, the testimony of Greg Anderson, director of Living Tongues, in this article really shows the intensity of the problem:

“With the loss of the languages, all kinds of wonderful things that the speakers did with their languages have also vanished, for example, some of the greatest works of oral literature ever produced — the multilingual performances with different characters speaking different languages that was found in the Pacific Northwest,”

“The highly elaborate dances that accompanied the oral tradition are frequently also gone. Large amounts of local knowledge about fauna and flora, ecosystem management, local place names, spiritual values, and so on are all submerged, altered or gone because the original languages that expressed these concepts are gone or no longer well understood.”