by Renee Petr

Indigenous languages hold a vitally important role increating Indigenous worldviews. Indigenous languages for millennia have held cultural knowledge, environmental understanding, land stewardship practices, and the identity of the people living on the land. All of these things create a person’s worldview, and as said by Rebecca Thomas, “language holds notions of a broader identity”. Indigenous languages are land-based languages. This means that the language describes what grows on the land, what the land looks like, the cycles of the land, how to care for the land and what cultural ceremonies take place on the land. These things woven into the language, create a worldview of connection to the land, show the people as being part of the land, and draws speakers of that language to want to look after the land. This creates a worldview of land stewardship, which means to protect, nurture and manage the land, what grows on and lives on the land, and how to live in harmonious ways with the land so that everything will thrive and continue to thrive for centuries to come.

Language revitalization is one way that Indigenous cultures are regaining their identity and traditional cultural and environmental knowledge. Indigenous languages are especially being recognized for the massive amount of environmental knowledge that they hold, such as land management techniques, and for their potential to help create a baseline of environmental health and biodiversity across Canada, that Western Science does not have, as it has not had the time to learn.

Indigenous language, culture and knowledge creates a worldview that is very different from Western worldviews. English language creates the view of ownership, identification or names things after important people or Latin words and phrases. It does not speak to how to care for this land, what species live or have lived on the land or what happened on the land since time immemorial. It doesn’t speak to the land's history, including major climatic events that happened over the millennia. The English language is about labeling, classifying, categorization, glorification and resource extraction. The English language does not create a worldview of environmental protection or land stewardship. It creates a worldview of resource classification for extraction purposes. The English language is void of the stories of the lands, does not create a connection to the land or the view that the land and everything on it are sovereign beings. The Western worldview is about money and progress at any cost.

Indigenous languages contain words that show the original species in an environment, and do not contain all of the words for invasive or newly introduced species. Therefore, by looking at the words of species in Indigenous languages from across Canada, we can see what species should be in an ecosystem or what species were in an ecosystem before colonization, and see what ones are new or invasive. By using the environmental knowledge from these Indigenous languages, we can create environmental baselines to help in our efforts to restore ecosystems, help to restore native plants and animals to an area, as well as learn how to properly care for the land, as Indigenous people have been doing since time Immemorial. All of the land stewardship information in these languages can help to build an environmentally conscious Indigenous worldview that everyone can learn, and that will help to ensure environmental protection and compassion for the earth and all living creatures on it.

Indigenous worldviews can help everyone learn to become better human beings and restore our place as part of a cyclical system where the land, plants and animals are our teachers, and where people are here to help care for the plants, animals and our earth, if we learn to listen in a new way and to expand and change our severely limited, colonial worldview.

by Renee Petr

Indigenous languages are land based. They are connected to the land through their words. These words speak of native species, create a baseline for what thrived in ancient environments, and tell stories of the cycles of the land over past millennia. They speak of important stewardship practices used to care of the land and animals, so that species thrived and survived for countless future generations. They carry the people’s perspectives of the land: what the land was used for, what ceremonies were done on the land and how the land helped to provide for the people.

These languages carry cultural significance and knowledge about the land, plants and animal species that lived with them and around them, and what could be used for medicine, food, shelter, transportation, commerce and clothing. Indigenous languages evolved in the environments of the people, growing with the land, and evolved as the land changed. Indigenous languages are encoded with so much environmental knowledge, cyclical knowledge, earth knowledge and have a vast, ancient cultural connection within them.

As Chief Brown of the Klahoose First Nation, said, “For our people, land and language aren’t separate. Our language and culture come from the land; it makes us who we are.”

by Renee Petr

Example 1:

To illustrate the connection between the land, the people and the language, I included an example of a place name in Lək̓ʷəŋən,that is the name for Victoria, and what it means in Lək̓ʷəŋənlanguage. “The present site of Victoria, particularly that portion between Wharf and Douglas streets and [near] the junction of Cook Street and Belcher Street [now Rockland], yielded a willow with very strong fibre. The inner bark of the willow was used for strapping stones for sinkers in deep-sea fishing, hence the name for the city of Victoria is (Ku-sing-ay-las) (which) means the place of the strong fibre (Keddie)”. The placename for Victoria in Lək̓ʷəŋən shows the connection and understanding of the land that the people had and where they found a certain type of willow that they needed for deep sea fishing.

Place names are one examples of how Indigenous ecological knowledge is encoded into Indigenous language, by showing what resources the land provided, what the land looked like or what happened on the land. In the English language, however, the word Victoria is in reference to Queen Victoria. From this name, you would not know what to do on that land or how to care for that piece of land or why to even care about that land. The name Victoria is instead just a possessive one, names after a person, with no reference to the land itself. Indigenous words have land stewardship stories and methods coded into each and every word and phrase. That is why it is vitally important to not only save these Indigenous languages so this land stewardship knowledge will not be lost, but because it tells us about climatic events that happened on the earth long before traditional Western written history was recorded. These words show how the land has changed before and tells us how to look after the species that need our protection due to the changing climate that we are experiencing now.

by Renee Petr

In another example of how the language holds information about land stewardship knowledge, the ʔayʔaǰuθəm word ʔoʔoɬqo (Sliammon), means “digging clams”. It signifies a place where clams were harvested and tended to. When you hear this word, it does not just mean a place to take a resource from the land. It has an implied knowledge within the word that it was a place that was tended to by Indigenous people since time immemorial, in order to best help the clams thrive, so that the people could harvest the clams year after year, in order to survive and thrive as well. It was not about taking all the clams, the word meant it was a place where clams were and where they would always be, because they were tended to in the ways of land stewardship. The word literally told people not only where to dig clams but encoded in the word was what type of tool to use, that digging would aerate the soil and that taking the bigger clams would help the smaller clams thrive. Also in the world is the knowledge that you created a clam garden in these areas in order to better tend to and nurture the clams during hotter than usual climate changes. So not only doesthe word tell you that that area was where you could dig for clams, it tells you how to be a land steward in that area during certain cycles of the earth.

by Renee Petr

In another example, the ʔayʔaǰuθəm word, xʷikʷɛθot, means “to brush body with cedar”. This shows how the land was tied into culture and ceremonial practices. Cedar was essential to this ceremonial practice and therefore it was known that to keep doing this practice, you would need to care for the Cedar trees, in order to have the cedar branches that were needed for this ceremony. Again, land stewardship was central to the meaning of the word, because these ceremonies were not held just once, they were held year after year or month after month for millennia. If you didn’t take care of the Cedar trees, you would not have Cedar for the ceremonies, and this would affect your cultural practices, as well as the entire environment. Therefore, land stewardship is intricately woven into Indigenous languages and is synonymous with each and every word, action or land cycle that happened and continues to happen.

by Renee Petr

Indigenous people have worked with the land over countless millennia and have developed land stewardship and conservation practices to best care for the land, no matter what climatic conditions exist and to ensure that the land and the life on it always remains healthy. They passed this knowledge down through stories and ceremonies, and these developed into cultural practices and words in their languages, which created Indigenous identity and worldview. The nuanced words that held so much step by step ancient knowledge on how to care for and understand the land, created languages that formed the worldview of Indigenous people, that was based upon respect for the land and the belief that the people and the land are one. Indigenous languages help create land stewardship principles to manage the places where they lived, showed what could be expected to happen during the cycles of the year and what to do when climate change happened that would allow them to survive.

Indigenous languages create a baseline for each environment and ecosystem across Canada and have conservation principes encoded within them, which with Indigenous wisdom keepers knowledge, can help all humans mitigate climate change where they live and protect the plants and animals that live on the land with them. If we follow Reconciliation ideas and actively listen to Indigenous wisdom and work with Indigenous knowledge keepers at all levels of government, industry and education, we can increase our chances of food sovereignty and create sustainable harvesting and management plans for every ecosystem, so that when severe climate change threatens our food supply and the land that we live on and the creatures that live on that land, we have plans in place to manage the changes and help everything survive. We can also learn how to clean up the environmental damage that has been caused by colonialist practices and learn to create new industries, that are approved by Indigenous nations, in order to prevent damage to the land or impact on the plant and animal life. Ancient Indigenous people had thriving economies that did not hurt their ecosystems, and we need to learn from their knowledge keepers on how to incorporate this knowledge in our own economic models. This will not only help our own generation, but Indigenous wisdom carried through Indigenous language will help future generations to become better with each generation, so that we can once again have a harmonious relationship with the earth and all her creations.

Hopefully we will learn the wisdom that Autumn Peltier, the chief water commissioner of the Anishinabek Nation, had to share with us when she said, “we can’t eat money or drink oil.” The faster colonialist people decolonize our thinking, identity and worldview, the faster we can help the earth get back into balance and return equality to all people with the guidance of Indigenous wisdom keepers. The more we learn about Indigenous place names and change colonial place names back to the traditional Indigenous ones, the more people will become connected to the land and will want to care for it and protect it. The more we learn about Indigenous month names from Indigenous knowledge keepers, the better we will be able to understand what should be happening during seasonal cycles, be able to predict climate change faster and be able to listen to and implement Indigenous land stewardship practices to help care for the land as our climate changes.

When we respectfully offer our help to Indigenous people to support their language revitalization programs, we can learn from these nuances and powerful words and sacred ceremonies and be able to help with land management practices
under the direction of Indigenous knowledge keepers. If we all work together and listen with respect to each other, we can create a better, healthier and more sustainable future where all people respect not only each other, but the land, plants and animals alike, and where no one takes more then they need, and no one damages anything in order to use gifts that the land has to offer. As I said before in this essay, Indigenous land-based languages hold Indigenous land stewardship worldviews, which through decolonization, we can learn from and incorporate the environmental knowledge that they hold, through collaboration between colonial settlers and Indigenous people and Western Science and Traditional Ecological Science, to create a better world for everyone.