Danielle Dacanay with the Tłı̨chǫ Government’s Language Division says while new federal funding will help expand the quantity, quality and diversity of broadcasting programs, what’s needed is more robust permanent funding.
“In [language] revitalisation there exists pools of permanent funding for English language education in Canada and there exist pools of permanent funding for French language education in Canada, but [for] Indigenous language education in Canada and Indigenous language promotion in Canada, the funding is almost entirely in the form of these rotating two to five to ten year grants,” explained Dacanay.
Last month, Culture Minister Mark Miller was in Yellowknife to announce two-years of federal funding with just over $17 million distributed to 23 Indigenous language broadcasting corporations across the country.
$17.2 million over two years, for the production and broadcasting of Indigenous audio and video content, will bring the Native Communications Society in Yellowknife $872, 262 over two years.
Inuvialuit Communications Society in Inuvik will receive $380,820 over two years and the Tlegohli Got’ine Government will receive $714,014 spread out over two years for Indigenous languages programming.
Additional language revitalization for the Tłı̨chǫ language includes $202,896, over one year.
Indigenous Language advocates including Dacanay have pointed out that the funding is also spread thin across a number of communities. Dacanay says that what’s needed is a more permanent, strong basket of funding for Indigenous language revitalization.
“There’s very little in the way of permanent stable funding, which means that oftentimes language revitalization programs, not just with Tłı̨chǫ but across the country spend as much of their time applying to novel grants and finding novel grants as they do actually doing language revitalisation work, whereas comparable institutions for the majority language from Canada [don’t need to do this].”
Indigenous languages and language funding equity
Dacanay said the funding is enough “to maintain” the Indigenous language broadcasting in the short term that NCS and CKLB provides, but explained that the current language programming available is limited.
“The existing programs in Indigenous languages can be expanded. Most programs that exist nowadays in Canada are either very short, so maybe last half an hour a day. I know that certainly Tłı̨chǫ radio broadcasting exists, but it only exists for a couple of broadcasts a day. You can’t get continuous radio coverage throughout the day in Tłı̨chǫ the way that you can, for instance, a majority language, like English and French,” said Dacanay.
“A lot of Indigenous language radio and television broadcasting covers a relatively narrow range of topics. Usually, there’s things like weather reports, local news reports on the status of roads, construction projects, this kind of thing. But ideally, we’d like to have radio broadcasts and television broadcasts in Indigenous languages, as wide in a range of topics that we have them in say a majority language like English or French where if you wanted to learn about, just about anything in English or French, you could do so on the radio, you could do so on television,” added Dacanay.
Dacanay said that overall the funding will support a significant increase in programming for Indigenous languages in the territory, about 3,000 to 4,000 hours of new audio material. While the change represents a “substantial” increase, it will be spread out over a number of Indigenous languages.
“That’s across all of the Indigenous languages that CKLB works with not just Tłı̨chǫ, that includes North Slavey, South Slavy, Chippewan and a few others, so broken down over a [number] of different languages and over two years.”
Dacanay emphasized the major problem is that it’s not a permanent or a definite set of funds
“It would be reevaluated in two years, for whether or not it would be renewed, expanded, increased or gotten rid of.”
Indigenous Languages Act
When asked what the federal government’s response is to concerns by Indigenous language advocates, representatives with the Heritage Ministry said they are promoting legal mechanisms.
“The Government of Canada remains strongly committed to fully implementing the Indigenous Languages Act. This includes investments through the Indigenous Languages Program’s Indigenous Languages component and the Northern Aboriginal Broadcasting component, which support Indigenous-led initiatives to revitalize Indigenous languages, strengthen their use in daily life, and promote the production and distribution of culturally relevant Indigenous audio and video programming in the North.”
Reps with Heritage Canada did not respond to questions about whether the government plans to increase the resources and provide permanent funding for Indigenous language revitalization.
Small portion of Tłı̨chǫ youth are speaking the language
Dacanay said about 30 or 40 per cent of the Tłı̨chǫ population are fluent speakers, but most of them are adults and Elders.
“Both Statistics Canada, and our internal survey that we ran in 2024 would suggest that only a fairly small proportion of youth, that is to say below the age of 30 but particularly below the age of 25, are fluent or proficient in the language.”
Dacanay said addressing the fact that Tłı̨chǫ language material is not readily available on the internet and in broadcast spaces could help change that.
“It’s one way of of trying to remedy this. If the youths are already in digital settings anyway, the youths are already spending the majority of their free time and their social time in some way in a digital space then in order for those youth to learn Tłı̨chǫ, we need to make Tłı̨chǫ available in that digital space.”
Dacanay said the Tłı̨chǫ language division is looking to go beyond local news and weather programming in Indigenous languages.
“In addition to the more practical kinds of broadcasts, things like weather broadcast, local news and so on, we’re also hoping to leverage some of these funds to not only record the more traditional stories and and personal stories for people throughout the Tłı̨chǫ region but also to have some kind of a system in place where we can have regular or semi regular storytelling being told on the radio using novel materials,” added Dacanay.
Dacanay said expanding the amount of Tłı̨chǫ narrative and storytelling on the radio on a daily or weekly basis is one goal.
“It happens now in Tłı̨chǫ radio, they will occasionally play archival audio of Elders from long ago or from recently ago telling stories, but we want to be able to expand that. We want to have more novel interviews and stories with Elders and we can have these not only as recorded bits of information that can be referred to later but also, as material for broadcast,” she said.
The Tłı̨chǫ language division is working to continue to expand resources and create a central repository.
“We’re actually in the process internally of reforming our policy as it relates to how audio visual and recorded materials get published. We’re trying to have a more centralised repository for them. At the moment, they are a bit scattered around but the materials produced using this funding —their availability and and their storage practises, will be something that we would have to negotiate with NCS.”
Dacanay said each of the four communities has access to an online repository that contains all of Tłı̨chǫ government’s known audio visual materials but its currently an “incomplete” set.
The Tłı̨chǫ language division is also working on visual combined with audio language programming. Dacanay said most interviews with Elders and other community members that are recorded and archived to date are audio only.
“You lose a lot when hearing a story only through audio cues and not at all through the body language and expression of the person speaking.”
The Tłı̨chǫ language division is working with Elders on projects to record their stories into audio visual pieces.
“We’ve been working in in all four Tłı̨chǫ communities, for the past several years now on Elders’ biographies. We’ve been going recording Elders’ life stories, not only in audio, but also in high quality video.”
Dacanay said so far they have recorded hundreds of hours of footage and there is an observable affect of audio visual storytelling on the community.
“Elders narrating stories from their lives, not only in audio form, but also in visual form and there’s been an incredibly positive feedback to that as a means of learning about people and as a means of learning about history.”
