It’s interesting how we can spend our lives in service around the world but find it difficult to resolve thorny challenges in our own backyards. In the wake of centuries of colonialization, Canada’s First Nations peoples are struggling today to hold on to indigenous languages that are fast disappearing, and with them the rich cultures and ways of life that go back millennia. For the past couple of years, ICA Canada has been developing a relationship with First Nations people and organizations around this issue of the loss of language. This has resulted in a new collaborative pilot project that will begin this month.   The project is called “C-I-LEARN”, (Children’s Indigenous Language Education Activity Resource Nurturing Project). Although it focuses on languages, it is really about culture and the restoration of hope and wholeness.

We are entering into a partnership with Mishko Bimaadziwin, an Aboriginal organization working with Native children across Ontario, and Save the Children Canada, to begin a pilot program in four communities over the next six months. Our goal is to use the experience we have developed in Imaginal Education to work with young children, and through them, their families and caregivers. Most of these children and their families live well below the poverty line.

We’ll be working together to develop a resource and training kit that we will use in the project but also make available more broadly across Canada through the network of people and organizations we have been developing and whom we know are concerned about these threatened languages.  The project will use the skills and wisdom of the elders in each community, many of whom still remember and speak the languages.  We will draw on the experience of ICA worldwide in community development methodologies and strategies of early childhood education to care for children, and on the experience of First Nations in developing child-centered programs for their people.  Save the Children Canada also has a long history of supporting the needs of vulnerable children around the world and is committed to the success of this initiative in its “backyard.” 

	Ojibway Elder, Freda McDonald, of Thunder Bay, Ontario

The challenge and the hope we have for the project are perhaps best summed up in the words of Ojibway Elder, Freda McDonald, last May in Thunder Bay: “...our language would heal and bring our people back to the spirit world...they’re so scattered now, and it hurts.  Some of you say that the language is being lost...it already is!  Generations have been lost...we need to get it back.  When you take a child’s language, you take away their identity.  We need to give them back their identity.  For children to know their language, it’s about identity, culture, heritage, legacy....it’s their right to life.”

Please check out our website for more information on this work as it develops: www.icacan.org 
Alternatively, contact Program Director Miriam Patterson at mpatterson@icacan.org