"Revival of Indian Languages to Keep Culture Alien"

NEW CREDIT - Ahnee.

The word is Ojibwe for welcome, but some Ojibwe Indians don't know that because the language is losing its voice.

"If we don't watch, the native language will be gone," Harvey Longboat, acting district superintendent of education for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, told a native language seminar Tuesday.

No one on the New Credit reserve is fluent in Ojibwe, an Algonquian language. The problem has reached a crisis among Iroquoian languages, especially Cayuga, Onondaga and Oneida, which are spoken on the Six Nations reserve.

"There are very few speakers left. Unless we do something now, a lot of the speakers won't be around," said Keith Lickers of the curriculum branch of the Ministry of Education.

If the language is silenced, the culture will wither away, he said. "The language and the culture are intertwined. If you lose the language you are impaired in appreciating the culture."

Mr. Lickers suggested that the word Indian used to carry a negative connotation, so natives were embarassed to stand up and be noticed for their language and culture.

Mr. Longboat suggested that band members have been leery of speaking for fear of offending.

"We'll have to decide whether the whole of native language is more important than how we write it. It doesn't matter how we write it as long as we can talk it. If we worry about how we write it, and we say we can't use it because we can't write it, we may not have it to write."

Reserves were urged to start language programs incorporating culture. Elders should be used to guide teachers and even visit classrooms.

At the national level, Indians should demand at the next First Ministers' Conference in 1987 that native language rights be entrenched in the Constitution, said Mr. Wolfe.