A member of Ehattesaht First Nation who came home to reclaim her aboriginal heritage has helped develop an exciting new Nuu-chah-nulth language learning tool for users of the popular iPod and iPad devices.
It’s called the Ehattesaht FirstVoices App and it is available for free download through the iTunes Store.
The program allows users to search out, listen to and practice speaking 750 words and 350 phrases in the Nuu-chah-nulth language, said co-developer Victoria Wells.
The Ehattesaht nation is on the north Island, with Zeballos as the closest municipality. Ehattesaht First Nation has about 400 members, with between 150 and 200 members living in the home community, depending on the season, Wells said.
“About 75 per cent of our membership is under 30 years of age,” she explained. “We have between five and 10 speakers of the language, and perhaps four or five in the village.”
Wells said the project sprang from a growing hunger among Nuu-chah-nulth youth to maintain and strengthen their sense of aboriginal heritage and identity. They know that language is one of the key factors and that elders are the most valuable learning resource. Until the advent of instant communications, it was difficult to maintain that connection.
“The definition of community has shifted. Young people are searching for community through technology,” Wells said. “The need is to bridge the gap between the elders who have maintained their language and the growing population of aboriginal youth.”
Not only are today’s young people able to stay connected to their families and communities by cell phone, texting, e-mail, Skype and social media like Facebook, their smartphones also give them easy access to information and learning tools. And that is where the language app comes in.
Like most apps, it is menu-driven and pretty straightforward to operate. The word and phrase screens are organized in alphabetical order (the English equivalent) on the right hand side. Users can scroll through to find the desired word or phrase, which is illustrated with a graphic, then touch the graphic to play the words.
“What I can do, in the privacy of my home, is practice these words without having to bother an elder to repeat back baby talk,” Wells said.
Created in 2003 with funding from the provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation and the federal First People’s Language and Culture Council, FirstVoicesis an online language network that has now developed five B.C. language apps on a shared platform.
Wells credits Fidelia “Auntie Fiddles” Haiyupis with putting the project in motion. Haiyupis, who holds a Master’s degree in education, began teaching the Nuu-chah-nulth language to children at Zeballos Elementary School, developing a curriculum as she went along.
“I speak our language. It was my first language,” Haiyupis said.
She spent 12 years in the residential school system, starting at the Christie Indian Residential School in Tofino and transferring to Kamloops for high school. Both schools were run by the Catholic Church, and while there was a divide between Catholic schools and the Protestant institutions like the Alberni residential school, both systems sought to discourage students from using their native languages.
Some students consciously remembered and spoke their language secretly as a form of resistance and to reinforce their own sense of identity. But for some survivors, speaking Nuu-chah-nulth can be stressful, raising old anxieties, Haiyupis said. Those anxieties are passed down from generation to generation.
Wells, whose mother is Ehattesaht and father is British, grew up in Vancouver.
“My mother worked for Indian Affairs in rural housing. She said she raised us in the city so we would not be subject to the residential schools,” Wells said. “I graduated in 1982, the year the last of the schools were shut down.”
Wells said her mother taught her a few words in Nuu-chah-nulth, but she grew up with zero sense of being an aboriginal person with a rich cultural heritage.
“I came back to find out who I was. I had no idea I was Indian,” she said. “I was home-schooled by the Nuu-chah-nulth elders like my great-uncle Moses Smith–the Old Buffalo–and people like the late Adam Shewish and Louise Roberts.”
Wells moved to Zeballos in 1997, where her children attended classes with Haiyupis.
“Fidelia had been working single-handed, and she recognized there was a need to take it to the next level,” Wells said.
Then in 2007, FirstVoices, at the invitation of Nuchatlaht First Nation and Zeballos Elementary/Secondary School, began looking for volunteers to seek out, compile and digitize the Nuu-chah-nulth language: words, meanings and culture. The language app itself is just one of the end products of a massive effort by many volunteers and elders.
Haiyupis herself dubbed nearly three-quarters of the words and phrases in the program. But creating “instant access” is time consuming, Wells noted.
“This is labour intensive. It has been a year and a half of effort,” she said. “For every second, when you push the image on the screen, we were putting in at least four to five days to create it.”
Haiyupis said while she is relatively tech-savvy and owns a smartphone, she doesn’t know how to use many of the functions. But smartphones, iPads and social media are second nature to young people, Haiyupis said.
“The children are able to help the adults and there is an exchange of knowledge,” she said. “The app and the technology allow that bridging between the generations.”
And at the same time, FirstVoices, the province and project workers have developed a certified Nuu-chah-nulth language curriculum that is now taught online, with the first student cohort nearing completion.
Students who complete the program will be able to use Nuu-chah-nulth as a second-language credit at the University of Victoria or Vancouver Island University.
Wells now holds a certificate in aboriginal language revitalization and is soon to embark on a Master’s program in this emerging discipline. Last week she attended a cultural repatriation conference in Washington D.C.
“Reclamation of language by colonized peoples is a huge movement,” Wells said. “I met with people from northern India, from Australia and all over the world. Our little micro-experience of this is part of a global movement. It’s like, when you push something down, this is the spring-back.”
Wells said the app team continues to make improvements to the language program.
“We’re working on version 2.0, which should be released in the next eight months or so,” she said.
