Cancelled: Towards an Observatory of Indigenous Languages Policy in the Americas.

Cancelled- February 13, 2019
from 12 pm to 1 : 30 pm
Albert Tucker Room (Senior Common Room) – 317 York Hall
PROFESSOR IAN MARTIN
Towards an Observatory of Indigenous Languages Policy in the Americas.
2019 has been designated by the United Nations as the Year of Indigenous Languages, and this talk is part of Glendon’s effort to mark this significant year. Inspired by such ‘observatories’ as the Queen’s Global Democracy Observatory, the proposed Observatory of Indigenous LP would be a scholarly research project that monitors the evolution of Indigenous LP in all the countries of the Americas. The Observatory would provide information about Indigenous language policies in a standardized format that would aid comparative research and contribute to the creation and development ofCanada’s and other countries’legislation on Indigenous LP. In its present state of ‘towardness’, the Index has been designed with the purpose of evaluating the current Canadian federal government promisedresponse to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action #13, #14 and #15, by applying the principles expressed in the TRC report to evaluateIndigenous language policies at the national/federal level in selected countries of the Americas. Also, in search of an index, we have drawn upon the Canadian experience with the protection of Official Language Communities in minority contexts, and sub-national legislation such as Nunavut’s Inuit Language Protection Act (2008), and existing provincial legislation (such as in B.C.)on Indigenous languages. An example of LP at the level of Indigenous Nation – the Kahnawa:ke Language Law – is included as well as a glance at two non-American Indigenous legislative measures: the Sámi Language Act and the Mversion of this talk has been delivered at the IAAL conference in Rio de Janeiro (August 2017), the FLACSOInternational Studies Conference in Quito (August, 2018), the Giidwewinanan/No Lang Indigenous LP Conference, Thunder Bay (May, 2017).
It’s appropriate that this talk be presented under the auspices of the CRLCC, since the contact between Euro-origin culture and language(s) and Indigenous culture and language(s) of the Americas could arguably be said to have been the ‘Big Bang’ of language and culture contact/conflict in the history of the world. It is certainly the only example of language/culture contact which has been claimed to have given rise to a such changes in planetary ecology as to warrant defining the contact as producinga newgeological epoch, the Anthropocene.