When a language fades so, too, does a cultural identity. The worldviews and traditional knowledge embedded in vocabularies and grammars, the unique sense of community shared by fellow speakers, a body of verbal artworks – all are lost.

It’s no wonder, then, that the suppression of language was a key feature of Canada’s longstanding policy of forced assimilation of indigenous peoples. Robbed of their ancestral languages, First Nations were thought more likely to melt into the majority.

As a result, many of the 150,000 indigenous children that went through the residential school system had their traditional names replaced by numbers and were punished, often brutally, for speaking their mother tongues. As those schools started to be phased out, thousands more First Nations children were taken from their families and placed in non-indigenous care during the so-called Sixties Scoop, another generation stripped of ancestral languages.

The tactic was remarkably successful. Some 63 indigenous tongues are spoken in Canada today, yet all are endangered. Without significant intervention, only three are expected to survive this century: Ojibwe, Cree and Inuktitut. This decline is in no small part of Ottawa’s making and, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded, it ought to be Ottawa’s to reverse.

So it was encouraging to hear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announce this week that his government will introduce an indigenous languages act in an effort to preserve and revitalize lost and disappearing tongues.

“We know all too well how residential schools and other decisions by governments were used as a deliberate tool to eliminate indigenous languages and cultures,” he said at a meeting of the Assembly of First Nations. “If we are to truly advance reconciliation, we must undo the lasting damage that resulted.”

He’s right. The devil now will be in the details. Will, for instance, the legislation grant indigenous people the right to schooling and public services in their ancestral languages, as it ought to do? More controversially, will it give these languages official status, on par with French and English?

Perhaps most important, how big will the investment be? At a recent meeting with the Star’s editorial board, Perry Bellegarde, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, talked about just how far we have to go on this vital challenge.

Ottawa now doles out $5 million a year toward indigenous language preservation, an amount Bellegarde described as “stupid.” “There’s no way you’re going to revitalize language with that kind of investment,” he said. “If the Crown spent what it did trying to kill the languages on rejuvenating them there would be plenty there.”

New Zealand, for instance, spends over $200 million per year to promote the Maori language and has effectively stopped its decline. Given the diversity of indigenous languages in Canada, the task will be much more complex, and presumably more expensive, here. It’s not clear that the $2.4 billion the Trudeau government has earmarked for indigenous education, including language preservation, will be enough.

Preserving languages is not only a moral project. Learning traditional tongues is known to mitigate many of the ills widely suffered in indigenous communities, improving educational outcomes and overall well-being. The government’s stated commitment to saving the many languages its predecessors endangered is a good step on the road to reconciliation. Now it should match its words with action, before there’s nothing left to save.

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