
Indigenous language in B.C. is facing a critical state of emergency, largely due to historical Canadian government policies aimed at assimilating Indigenous peoples into English-speaking, non- Indigenous society. However, located in northern B.C., the Children of the Taku, a non-profit society connected to the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, is leading a revival of their language.
Despite the passing of all their Elders who were fluent in the language, a new cohort of Lingít speakers is emerging. Through the use of an innovative curriculum and methodology, a group of Tlingit individuals and settler-allies are progressing from zero speaking ability to advanced fluency.
Together, with Dr. Christine Schreyer from UBC Okanagan, they are documenting the journey of these cohort members while also capturing stories of language loss through residential schools and the resilient efforts of community members, particularly Elders, to revitalize and preserve their linguistic heritage for future generations.
To learn more about this project, we spoke with K’èdukà Jack, the executive director of the Children of the Taku Society, and Dr. Schreyer, an associate professor of anthropology at UBC Okanagan, who has been working with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation on a variety of initiatives since 2005.
In this conversation, we explore how their efforts are not only restoring a critically endangered language but also strengthening cultural identity and community resilience.
There are so many insights shared that will be valuable not only to other communities working on language revitalization but also to academics interested in learning how they can support these efforts.
This initiative is supported by the Community-University Engagement Support Fund.
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Content Advisory: This interview discusses residential school experiences, cultural suppression, and the long-term impacts on Indigenous peoples and communities. These topics may be distressing or triggering for some listeners and readers, especially for those who have experienced trauma or systemic violence. We acknowledge the deep pain and harm that such discussions may evoke and encourage you to prioritize your well-being.
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Edits have been made to this written Q&A for clarity, style, and tone.
Listen to the audio podcast above for full introductions from our guest speakers.
Can you tell us how the project got started? And why was it important to you and what community goals were you hoping to address?
Christine: So, I’ve been working with Taku River Tlingit for a very long time. As I continue my work focusing on place names reclamation, I heard about the work of the Children of the Taku Society in language revitalization, particularly how this group of dedicated learners, including K’èdukà and a few others I’ve known for a very long time, were becoming fluent speakers. They were using the Paul Creek curriculum from the Salish School of Spokane, which is also related to the Okanagan and includes a former Ph.D. student of mine, Michele Johnson—Sʔímlaʔxw—and the Syilx language houses.
I became curious about how this learning system moved to the Yukon and northern B.C., how they picked it up, and started developing more speakers. So, I reached out to the Children of the Taku Society—or rather, we mutually reached out to each other.
There’s another teacher named Neilatóo.atsien Allan who asked if I had any students who’d be willing to help them develop the curriculum materials for this language fluency transfer system. I found some students to assist with that work because the curriculum materials are being built as they learn how to speak, so it’s a lot of work.
So that was our first connection. As I learned more through my students, we became very interested in documenting this journey because language loss is so common across many Indigenous communities in Canada. I saw that they were doing such an amazing job in creating a welcoming environment for the speakers. So, K’èdukà and I partnered together to develop a book project.
We decided to tell this story from my own experiences of hearing Lingít in the community and working with elders who had spoken the language, and then document the journey of the cohort as they progressed to intermediate levels of fluency. It was clear to me that this was an amazing journey, and I felt that others needed to know about it—not just other communities working to revitalize their languages, but also academics who might be able to partner in support of these revitalization efforts.
K’èdukà: I think there was a natural fit that happened between Christine and me. We’ve known each other since I was a teenager, in particular through my Auntie Louise, who had brought Christine into the community in that welcoming way she does with so many people. I remember meeting Christine for the first time, and as time went on, it became clear that her focus on anthropological work was such a good, natural fit for revitalizing the ways of Indigenous people.
The genocide we experienced really disrupted everything, bringing us to the brink of losing so many of our ways of being. Now, the anthropological work that someone like Christine does really supports people who are still deeply in the throes of the healing that needs to happen around the genocide that we experienced and provides us with the support we need to partner with someone like her.
I was familiar with the work and various projects Christine was involved in, and our community always felt supportive of her efforts. As our life journeys continued, my experience and familiarity with her relationship with our community grew over time. I believe that’s exactly how it should be—to be in partnership with a community in a longstanding way. If you’re benefiting from being invested in by an Indigenous community, then there needs to be reciprocity. Maintaining a longstanding relationship is one of the best ways to achieve that. Christine is one of the best examples I’ve seen in our community of someone who has nurtured this kind of deep, many-years-long relationship.
We always knew each other and would chat about our work whenever we crossed paths, even ending up at the same conferences a couple of times. Our work just naturally intersected in that way. It was an important moment in time for us because I had been working on creating a fluency transfer system specifically to replicate what the Salish School of Spokane had done. They have been extremely successful in their work, and the status of their language, as well as the demographics of the communities that share that language, were so similar to ours. I don’t think I fully understood what a good fit it was at the beginning of this work. But I did know, from someone I learned from—who happened to be one of Christine’s students—that this was one of the most effective methodologies ever implemented. As far as I can tell, it’s probably the most effective approach for the status and scope of where those people and their language disruption were at the time.
It was very serendipitous how everything came together the way it did—so many crossing connections that supported us in reaching a place where we’re now able to partner on projects. At the time when this particular project started, the Children of the Taku Society had just ramped up our curriculum development with the intention of getting as much done as possible in the fluency transfer system. We were focused on implementing this highly successful curriculum and methodology system created by the Salish School in Spokane. Their recommendation to us, as they continue to mentor and support us consistently and reliably every year, was to bring this to completion and achieve what they did.
Their recommendation to us was to move faster. They emphasized that we were losing our birth speakers and needed to complete the work as quickly as possible. They advised us to be cutthroat about where we focus our energy and time on.
I don’t think I’ve always been the best at that. There have been moments where I’ve questioned my choices. But overall, I think we’ve been really smart about how we decided to move forward as a team. We’ve accomplished a lot over the last few years. I’ve been working on this for ten years, but the Children of the Taku Society has really been focused on it and growing our team for the last five years.
We’ve slowly grown a team of up to ten people. At that time, we needed individuals who could handle the heavily intensive technical work, so we reached out to Christine, knowing she had students interested in these areas who could support us. Christine was already partnered with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation on various archival projects, so it was a great fit for us to benefit from some of the systems that were in place.
In this project, we are at the midpoint of developing our curriculum, which includes six textbooks—two for beginners, two for intermediate learners, and two for advanced learners—we are just starting to tip into the advanced materials. This project was intended to support the development of what we hoped would be the most amazing textbook in the series of six. It’s actually the fifth textbook.
We love the story-based textbooks; every second textbook in a level is a story-based one. They’re very important to us because they’re based on our ancestors’ stories, the ones that have been carried forward for generations. We learn these stories in our language, which is a beautiful thing.
But this project was focused on our cultural textbook, which will be based on the words and knowledge of our people in the community. We refer to this textbook as the “cultural Bible.” I’m not sure if that’s the best name for it, but it captures the essence. It will have four units with 60 cultural topics, all taught entirely in the language.
One of the key reasons why this methodology is so successful is that from day one, even as very new beginners, learners are immersed in the language environment. By the time they move into the advanced materials, the textbooks will likely amount to around a thousand pages of Lingít with no English at all represented.
It’s a beautiful thing to see—having 60 cultural topics covered entirely in our language. To ensure that all these topics are representative of our community and integrate our land-based way of being and culture, we needed to find a way to interview our community members and knowledge keepers. The focus of this project was to secure enough funding to support this work, ensuring that we could involve our community and accurately reflect our cultural heritage in the curriculum.
One thing I should mention—since there’s a chance that Christopher Parkin, LaRae Wiley, and Graham, our Salish School Spokane mentors, might listen to this—is that this isn’t how they recommended we do it. We could have moved faster if we had followed their advice. However, we really wanted to ensure that our approach was true to our land-based way of being.
We’re not a nation that’s been alienated from our land and is now part of a larger urban centre. We’re a remote community of about 300 people at the end of the road. We still maintain a very strong connection with our land. Many community members rely on land-based provisions for their daily sustenance, going out and seeking what they need directly from the land.
The main reason I moved back to my community was to be in stronger relationship with our land and territory and to continue the traditions of my grandparents, who lived a very land-based lifestyle here. We wanted that to be strongly represented in this textbook. We made sure that our community members’ voices and knowledge are encompassed in this textbook in a significant way. This commitment may have slowed down our work a bit, but we discussed it as a team and were willing to make that sacrifice. That’s some of the larger context and specific goals of our organization we wanted to meet.
Although our organization and this work originated in Taku River Tlingit territory, our team, the Knowledge Keepers we interviewed, and the language birth speakers who are the authors of our textbooks are not all Taku River Tlingit people. Our team and specialists come from many different Lingít communities. The work we do is meant to support Lingít language learners from any background, including non-Lingít-born individuals, settlers, and anyone interested in learning the Lingít language.
I wanted to make sure to mention that the acknowledgments should recognize not just the Taku River Tlingit people but also the individuals from our three Lingít sister communities—Atlin, Carcross, and Teslin—as well as those on the coast who support our work. It’s important to give credit where it’s due and acknowledge all those who have contributed to our efforts.
K’èdukà: In my work, I’ve always felt that involving community voices supports the natural attachment-based relationships we have in small Indigenous communities like ours, our connection to the land fosters these relationships. Bringing community members together to understand the outcomes and listen to their needs helps ensure community buy-in, which is crucial for moving projects forward.
In communities where ongoing healing can prevent people from naturally turning towards connected attachment-based relationships that we’re born into. Those are the areas of disconnect that slow down processes like this, slow down the revitalization of our ways of being, and slow us down from getting to where we want to go as people. Sometimes, the process of involving the community may seem like a sacrifice from a productivity standpoint, especially when operating from a colonial productivity mindset. However, this approach often results in more meaningful and healing outcomes for our people, which ultimately supports our vision more effectively than a purely productive approach could.
Christine: Let me add a bit more about the books we’ve been discussing. We’re working on two main projects: a book about the story of language reclamation with the cohort and the Children of the Taku Society, and the curriculum books.
One of the things I began doing was interviewing members of the cohort. These interviews will contribute to sharing their story in our larger book, providing a detailed account of their experiences and the language reclamation efforts.
The curriculum stories, as K’èdukà mentioned, come from community members across the Lingít nation. During our interviews, we originally planned to focus on how certain generations who went to residential schools lost their languages due to colonial genocidal practices. We wanted to hear those stories to balance the narrative with the stories of language reclamation.
However, the approach shifted somewhat from our original proposal. Instead of solely focusing on the loss of language, we broadened our perspective to include a more comprehensive view of the reclamation process and the diverse experiences within the Lingít nation. It was a serendipitous decision to build these stories into the curriculum. By doing so, people could share their knowledge about living on the land, even if they didn’t speak the language. They shared practices and insights about Lingít Kusteeyíand their ways of life. This approach allowed them to reflect on where they had encountered the language and how it had been a part of their lives, enriching the curriculum with a deeper context of cultural practices and connections.
These interviews highlighted people’s knowledge and feelings about the language. They expressed why it’s so important to bring it back. We often asked questions to delve into these sentiments. I should mention that the interviews were conducted by the Children of the Taku Society team rather than by me.
I interviewed the cohort, while the Children of the Taku Society team conducted the interviews with the community members. I then get to listen to and incorporate those pieces into the book project. We asked questions like, “What’s your first memory of hearing Lingít?” or “When do you first remember speaking it?” Hearing these stories from community members has been incredibly important to capturing the full scope of their experiences and connection to the language.
I still need to deep dive into all of the replies we’ve received, but it’s been really interesting to see how these two pieces—the cohort interviews and the community member stories—balance each other. Each perspective adds depth and richness to the overall narrative of our language reclamation project.
Can you tell us the origins of the project’s name “Lingít: a love language for community”?
K’èdukà: My Uncle Sylvester, who recently passed away, became a profound and intentional teacher in the later years of his life. Despite his long-term debilitating illness that significantly affected his physical body, he found spiritual pathways forward, which deeply influenced his teachings.
One of the conversations Uncle Sylvester and I had was about language. He believed that speaking in our language would help him express love in a way that had been taken from him during his time in residential school.
In residential schools, the intentional disruption of our attachments was strategic and deliberate. For example, they would keep children separated by gender, and even if siblings were in the same classroom or school, any attempt to make eye contact or connect with them would result in punishment. If a child looked in their siblings’ direction, they would be slapped or hit to interrupt and disrupt those connections, punishing them for trying to connect with the people they loved.
He shared that even later in life, when he entered a room and saw someone he loved, he found it difficult to express his affection. The more he loved someone, the less he felt he could show that love.
And what he believed was that if he could learn the language, then he would be able to access expressing that love and the healing that was needed to be able to do that with the freedom that he needed. And every time we saw each other, he would ask me over and over again, How do I say “I love you, my sister” so that he could say that to my mom in the language and I would say _ixsixán, ixsixán and then he would say it over and over again, _ixsixán, ixsixán, trying to memorize it so that he could say it to my mom.
We had a lot of important moments like that. He believed that he would be able to access that epicenter of healing in the language, is something that I believe very much. It’s one of the reasons we named the project as we did. It was inspired by one of our first unintentional interviews. Gunalchéesh for bringing that up, Christine because it was a significant influence on how we decided to document our work and frame our questions.
One day, my uncle and I were sitting in the Yukon Inn, a popular spot for breakfast, when he began discussing the importance of language. I pressed record on my phone and sent the recording to Christine, saying, “This is really important. It should be in the book.” It was one of the most significant conversations I had ever had about language, and I felt it needed to be included.
We then considered expanding the scope of the book to not only document this conversation but also honour those we’ve lost and recognize individuals who have contributed their words, knowledge, and understanding. We wanted to include their insights as Knowledge Keepers and their deep understanding of what our communities need to heal from the genocide we endured.
Christine (Gunalchéesh). I think that story is so important. I get emotional because one of the first times we connected was when we were moose hunting with K’èdukà’s uncle. I have this photo that is always on my desk, and on multiple desks in multiple offices, of us just being out on the land and learning about moose hunting when I was living with her aunt at the time. I learned a lot from her uncle as well, and the fact that it was tied to love and then stories of loss made it very important.
What has been your favorite experience or outcome from the project?
Christine: During this project, I had the opportunity to attend the Children of the Taku Society’s teacher training to learn more about how their teachers teach within the cohort. Every time I did an interview, it became one of my favorite parts. Doing those interviews with the cohort members has been really special. We tend to have moments where we laugh, and sometimes we cry, but there’s just so much safety in those interviews.
That sense of safety comes out all the time when I interview members of the cohort for the book. This learning, this fluency transfer system—whether it’s in the classroom experience or just being part of the cohort—is such a safe place for people to learn, and they have so much fun. They laugh all the time. There are always jokes in the class. There’s just so much going on and laughter is a big part of it. Everyone kept saying that if you were in the class, you’d experience that too. Of course, we haven’t mentioned this yet, but it’s only members of the cohort who can attend and be in that space or any of the classes. Observers aren’t permitted.
Even when I first met all the members of the cohort, where K’èdukà was going to introduce me, and it was odd for me to be there, just coming in at the end. Being in that space with everyone was unusual. But when I got to attend the teacher training, I could see more of what happens in the classroom, how that environment functions, and even practice lessons. There were people being trained to teach, and I was there to learn how to be a teacher as well. I participated in some of the lessons where the new teachers were coming forward, and getting to be in that space and learn with everyone was incredibly powerful. It was so meaningful for many people to understand this method and learn it, especially since there were people brand new to the methodology coming into the teacher training.
There are people from other communities as well. K’èdukà mentioned how Children of the Taku has been modeled on the Salish School of Spokane, and now they’re really becoming a model for people across the Yukon and other communities—especially for , Tutchone and Gwichʼin, and their communities, who have come to the Yukon to learn about this model.
That experience of being there and learning from one of the teachers, Khudesishéexh Esquiro, who is a member of the cohort was incredibly powerful for me. It was, without a doubt, one of my favorite experiences
K’èdukà: I just want to add to what Christine said and include a little educational piece. The reason why we don’t allow people to join a cohort once it’s been formed is that it’s not safe for the students to have people coming in and out of the classrooms. This is different from a typical classroom environment where English might be spoken, and visitors might come and go. For our cohort, which is an immersion environment, maintaining a stable and secure learning environment is crucial for the students’ safety and progress.
In a classroom where it’s an immersion environment and people are just learning the language, we refer to ourselves as “baby speakers,” much like how infants learn language. We use very specific safety mechanisms to ensure a supportive and secure space for everyone. This approach is essential for creating a safe learning environment where participants can focus on acquiring new sounds and language skills without interruptions or the added stress of unfamiliar individuals coming and going.
Christine coming to the teacher training made a lot of sense because that environment was in English, where we were discussing things and covering the material. However, once we transitioned into the immersion classroom, the dynamics changed. At that point, only those who had signed up and participated could stay. This approach is crucial for maintaining the immersion environment, ensuring that the learning space remains consistent and supportive for everyone involved.
So, I just wanted to give some information there. For myself, I think that my favorite experience—there were many—because, of course, this was such a close, community interactive process, which often isn’t the case when developing curriculum. This textbook was special.
A lot of the time, we’re just sitting behind screens, working on documents, and editing things. We get to record with our Elders, but we’re not interacting with the wider community. We definitely don’t get to speak English this way very often.
What we were doing was documenting and interviewing our Knowledge Keepers in the community in English. Then, we would turn that into a script which we recorded later with our Elder. During this process, I had the opportunity to connect with one of my uncles, whom I loved dearly and spent a bit of time with. Even as his niece, who he would normally just share his knowledge with for free, I was able to engage in a reciprocal way.
I was able to reciprocally give him a payment funded by the project, acknowledging his highly valuable role in our community as a Knowledge Keeper and our relationship. There were some shifts in our interactions where I interviewed him about setting net on the ice for trout and exactly what that process looks like. He was able to provide detailed, almost scientific measurements for everything.
There was this really beautiful moment when he said, “Now that you know all this, I want to take you out and go through the process with you step by step.” He had verbally shared so much with me, and I knew I could ask him any time to do that with me, and he would probably say yes.
I think the reciprocity I was able to offer him, that I normally wouldn’t have been able to as just an assistant in some way, was significant. It really helped us set up some space and time to work together. I ended up purchasing a fish net, and there’s still quite a bit of ice out there. So, it arrived not too long ago and I still have to find some rocks under the snow to weigh it down and do all these extra steps that I didn’t think of. But I’m really hoping to be able to get out this year and you know, become independent in those skill sets that he is independent in and he could teach me and yeah, just other unbelievable stories that I heard from him about how we hunt for Xalak’ách’, porcupine, how to catch a porcupine and how he would when he was a young boy, like literally crawl into the Xalak’ách’ dens and pull them out with a hook. Things like that that I just like, literally blew my mind. I was like, What? That’s crazy. Do you think that we could go do that and I could crawl in? Do you think I could fit? And we’re just like having all these unbelievable conversations that resulted in such an increase in my own understanding and my knowledge and really inspired me to want to go out and do those things in the same way that my family does them.
For me, that was a really important outcome. It was probably my favorite part of the project—spending that time doing those things in this way.
What strengths did each party bring to the project?
Christine: K’èdukà is an amazing leader in her community, an organizer, and such a supportive executive director for the entire team. Over the years we’ve worked together, I’ve seen the team grow with more and more Lingít people. Even in our application, we noted the percentage of Lingít people on the team at that time, and it has grown exponentially since then. I think this growth is a huge strength, along with her extensive knowledge.
K’èdukà also has experience with a revitalizing Indigenous law project where she had interviewed people before. Her skills from interviewing people about governance and law in Lingít society were crucial for this project. She learned about the ethics of recording people, and where to archive that. Those were also considered in this project.
As an academic, I think about putting things through our ethics board, which we didn’t do for this project since it wasn’t research in the same way my other work is. For instance, the interviews with the cohort are part of research here at UBC, and I’ve submitted that to our ethics board. However, being able to replicate and think conscientiously about how the recordings were handled was an important aspect that K’èdukà brought to our project.
And just the inspiration she brings to everyone and the evident passion she has for this work is incredible. I think these are some of the things that K’èdukà has really brought to the project, and it’s been such a pleasure to work with her. We vibe off each other well, sharing similar ideas about what’s important and how to collaborate. Even if we have differences of opinion, we can talk them out. It’s been a joy to work with someone who believes in the same things you do in terms of how research moves forward. Given how long we’ve known each other, it’s nice to see our relationship evolve into a blend of our passions and work.
K’èdukà: Yeah, I agree. It’s interesting because not all partnerships through a program like this may have the same level of trust that Christine and I share. As an Indigenous person, my level of trust for a university administrator or someone affiliated with an institution like a university might not be as high.
That’s for good reasons. Often, people in these roles don’t have enough experience or life investment in the communities and in empowering those people. That foundational support isn’t always there. In this case with Christine, though, it is. If it were someone else, I’d be answering this question very differently.
If it weren’t for Christine, the approach would be much more clinical, I think. But the truth is, there was a longer foundation of understanding built from the work she had done, the integrity she brought to past projects, and the conversations we had through our various interactions.
Anthropology is just such a strange term to apply to people who are still existing and living these lives.
I think the personal focus that both of us have, and the passions we feel as individuals, really aligned well. We were always interested in what each other was working on, and when our interests intersected, it felt like a natural fit. My experience as an Indigenous person, having moved home to my community and committed to living on this land and serving my people, brings a skill set and understanding that’s irreplaceable. This lifetime of experience and education is essential for every project and non-negotiable. It cannot be created in people who are not ancestrally born to the Lingít bloodline. This connection matters deeply. And then there’s the individual aspect specific to Taku River Tlingit First Nation and the land base we belong to.
Each family’s background and who you are as an individual within your family adds many layers to this experience. That deep knowing and lived experience are irreplaceable in a project like this. Finding partnerships that truly honour and match that understanding is becoming more common, but it remains an essential component of how we’ve learned to work together.
Living on the land of my people every single day, being committed to the work, staying plugged into the direction we’re heading, and knowing everything that has happened before—being born into a family with ancestors who have existed on this land since time immemorial—is truly irreplaceable.
To work cohesively together, it’s crucial for both parties to understand the significance of the lived experience and commitment to the land. As someone who has dedicated my life in this way, I don’t have much time to jump through all the colonial hoops of an ethics board, which I don’t fully understand the full scope of, or deal with the administrative and colonial processes that often come with applications. It’s essential that partners supporting the project recognize where they can save the energy of those who have lived experience and are directly involved in the community.
Working with Christine, I felt that she supported this approach every step of the way. There are common concerns that need to be standardized, but also specific implementations and parameters to meet the community or individual where they are at. These should be clearly defined in the process and the consensual agreements made upfront.
We got clear about what those aspects needed to look like. Even though we’ve been in relationship for a long time, it was really important to thoroughly explore and discuss every detail of what the process would entail. Now that the project is nearing completion, Christine and I are in the process of discussing what’s next and what we’ll move forward with.
We reviewed a few applications and explored them further. Christine was the first to point out that where they wanted to store the information didn’t meet our community’s needs. She recognized that they intended to keep it in their archives instead of ensuring that your community’s archives were the primary repository for the information.
We’re clear about ownership and the traditional knowledge practices that need to be incorporated. Although this hasn’t been formally documented in a way that aligns with colonial standards, it’s well understood and part of our lived experience. Every day, every Indigenous person on my team can advocate for these standards and this way of being.
Christine ultimately has been incredibly supportive, meeting us where we’re at and spending years developing a deep connection with our community. Her commitment is unwavering, long-term, and truly for the right reasons. It’s not fundamentally about adding to her résumé or advancing her own career. Her focus is on empowering the Taku River Tlingit people, which she prioritizes above all else.
Her investment is genuine, and you can really feel it. It’s not contrived or intended as a stepping stone for her individual goals. This stands in stark contrast to the common societal focus on individualism and personal advancement. Indigenous people are raised with a collective mindset, where serving the community and dedicating energy for the collective good is paramount. In this space and on this land, individualism takes a backseat to the needs and well-being of the community.
You’re a part of something bigger than yourself. Sometimes, that mindset doesn’t align with educators, researchers, or individuals focused on advancing their personal careers. It’s often obvious when there’s a mismatch, though sometimes it might not be immediately clear, which can be a bit jarring. Usually, you can tell quickly when it’s not a fit.
In a colonial context, where there’s a clash of ways of being, we often don’t have the time to jump through the heavy colonial hoops required to be in good standing or meet institutional standards. Educational institutions and financial recommendations expect us not just to reach a certain point but also to do extensive work to maintain that status. This can be a significant challenge.
The administrative burden takes so much of our energy away from our true goal of raising our children in the language and creating intergenerational fluency in our communities. We know we need to maintain a nonprofit and manage various tasks, but our connection to individuals like Christine, who is willing to navigate these approaches in a colonial existence and provides us with access to her platform which she maintains in colonial society so that we can have a partnership that meets all of those parameters, is invaluable. It helps us avoid jumping through all those hoops and expending energy on tasks that should have been our birthright in the first place.
What advice do you have for others hoping to develop successful community-university partnerships?
Christine: Yeah. So Gunalchéesh) to K’èdukà for talking about those aspects of applying for grants and all those hoops you have to jump through.
I would say be prepared to do the hoop jumping for people. Putting that burden on individuals can be overwhelming. I want to give a shout-out to CUES because their application process is much easier compared to SSHRC and other funding bodies. It really puts the funding into the hands of the community. K’èdukà would often remark on how beneficial this approach is. I would comment on how this funding is for you, its for our project, for what we’re doing and what’s most beneficial for you.
I think it’s surprising for communities to learn that we don’t have to revert to previous methods if we make changes. It’s all for the project and what’s best for them. Knowing that there are funding opportunities like this can be eye-opening. Early in our partnership, we developed a research agreement based on Lingít matriarchal ways of understanding. This agreement outlined the roles and responsibilities, ensuring that things remained in the hands of the community.
Our timeline has shifted, but the agreement did include a timeline. One of the things we discussed during the agreement process was how I handle recordings, particularly in relation to wills. Over nearly 20 years of working with the Taku River Tlingit, I’ve accumulated a significant amount of knowledge, from ancestors and their stories, and am very mindful of how this information is managed.
I’ve recorded stories and audio from ancestors, and it’s important to me that this information goes back to the community. Even in my own will, which I updated during COVID, I included a section specifying where these recordings should go. I’ve appointed an academic executor to ensure that they return to the community, even though I’ve already returned them. This is to make sure that all the work I’ve done ultimately reaches the community and isn’t lost and making sure that all of things I’ve done will come back to the community.
My advice would be to stay flexible and recognize that you may need to handle the administrative tasks and hoop jumping. Capacity building is crucial. Ensure that you’re sharing your knowledge from the university with community partners, so they can use it to benefit their communities and share their learning with others. This helps not only their own community but also contributes to the broader team and beyond.
Also, it’s important to involve younger team members from the community and ensure they are aware of and gain access to this knowledge. I highly recommend community-based research, it can be incredibly rewarding, but it requires the right intentions and a clear focus on serving the community and supporting their goals.
Even if you have your own research goals, community-based research is ultimately for the community, and they have the final say. This was evident in our interviews, where the community’s perspective and decisions were paramount.
It made more sense to have community members conduct the interviews because the topics were so sensitive. It wasn’t about me insisting on being the one to interview; rather, it was about respecting the community’s needs and ensuring that those who are most connected to the topics were handling the interviews.
I gladly handed over the responsibility to the team so they could interview their own family members—uncles, mothers, cousins, and grandparents. For interviews on cultural topics, I don’t have access to those recordings. They are community recordings, specifically for their scripts, and I didn’t insist on seeing them just because they are tied to the project.
No, those recordings are theirs, and I’ll only see them in the format they’re presented in the curriculum. I don’t need to hear all of it. My role focuses on the interviews related to the book project, which is clearly outlined in our consents and recording agreements. It might be jarring for some researchers to not have access to all the information from a community-based project, but it’s an important part of respecting the community’s control over their own data. And I don’t, and I’m perfectly okay with that because it’s not for me. That’s not what this was for.
So I will end by saying Gunalchéesh to K’èdukà most of all for being my research partner and trusting me, but also to CUES for this funding opportunity, this project was amazing. And I think we’ve both learned so much and we know that it will have ripple effects through the community of the Lingít nation but also beyond that, so Gunalchéesh.
K’èdukà: I would just add to that for communities feeling some hesitation around partnering with universities, that’s very reasonable. Never consider it unreasonable based on your interactions with a particular researcher, a team, or even the application process. It’s important to be clear about your community’s standards for traditional knowledge and how you protect it. Moving forward with confidence means clarifying agreements and ensuring that your ancestors’ knowledge is not misused or used in ways that your community or the individuals interviewed did not consent to.
There are agreements that can accurately reflect the needs of your community, so don’t doubt that. Make sure you ask for the process, the application, the standards, and the agreements to include everything you need. Get really clear on this before you move forward. It can be a jarring experience for your community to realize that in your archives, you might not have the information that a researcher or a project has gathered over the years with your grandparents. I, myself have experienced this: not having access to your grandmother’s voice and the knowledge she may have shared in various documentation processes, and then finding out that you’re not considered eligible to access that information.
I think that those historical processes, which haven’t always been in the best interests of Indigenous people, are still standing in many cases. They even create standards of access that sometimes Indigenous people end up using against each other, leading to divisiveness at times.
It’s important that we move forward with something different and also cleaning up some of those rights to access agreements from the past. It would be excellent if universities just standardized this and incorporated it into their overall policies and procedures to ensure that Indigenous peoples have the rights and access they deserve and are recognized as the predominant knowledge holders for this information moving forward.
What stood out to me about what Christine said was her openness to not having access to portions of the interview that weren’t applicable to the project she was working on. In her process, she also made sure to provide a transcription to the individuals she interviewed. They were allowed to strike out anything they didn’t agree with or didn’t want included in the interview, and she would destroy any information that people chose not to have included.
She’s going to do a full transcription and ensure to provide that in a timely manner. Additionally, she’ll give them the original audio on a device of their preference. All these details were included in the documentation, and I think we as an organization were open to that. We included it in our agreements, using the same consent form.
For the people we were interviewing, it wasn’t as necessary to go to that level of detail, like making sure my mom gets the transcription of her and me. However, if she requested it, of course, I would provide it. She would just trust me enough that it’s not at the forefront of her mind when it comes to us.
But my team wouldn’t have been willing to move forward if Christine had wanted to have access to all that cultural knowledge and wouldn’t proceed without it. That was the main question I was asked by most of the people I interviewed. In the consent form, we list UBC as a partner, and there’s a whole section related to consent and the requirements that need to be included because of the university’s standards.
So, people had a lot of questions about that. There was a sense of broken trust from other projects and, more broadly, from colonial institutions in general.
So yeah, I’d say it’s crucial for people to move forward with the confidence to change the status quo in these processes and not settle for anything less. This is especially important in the absence of traditional knowledge policies that support small projects or independent organizations.
I know that the Taku River Tlingit First Nation is working on a traditional knowledge policy that could provide some of those standards of understanding that we could use or build upon. But in the meantime, it’s important to be clear about your bottom lines and not move forward without ensuring they’re met.
What’s next for the project?
K’èdukà: I think what’s next for us at Children of the Taku Society is moving towards completing the fluency transfer system. This project helped us finish one section of the development for the next textbook we’re focused on. We have a solid and structured strategic plan that we’re following, which is intended to guide us through the completion of the six textbooks that make up the fluency transfer system over the next three years.
This project really supported us in moving forward and diving into what we consider the most important textbook in the whole series. We’re consistently and simultaneously developing multiple textbooks at once.
But the work we’re focusing on is all coming together at this moment. We’re finding ourselves cresting the peak of a mountain and beginning to gain momentum on the other side, if that makes sense.
The analogy I’ve been using for my ten years of involvement in this work is that we’re finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. To give people a better understanding, we have a website under construction at www.childrenofthetaku.com. This site will host all of our developed materials and, ideally, our Facebook page will provide information about teacher trainings and other annual activities.
We’ve started to see other First Nations and language groups up north beginning to adopt this methodology. Our hope and dream is that they catch up with us and advance more quickly than we did. We’d see that as a positive outcome.
It would motivate us to move a little faster and would also mean we did a good job of training them. In the big picture, we’re continuing to develop curriculum and pilot it in our classrooms. We currently have multiple cohorts of learners who are becoming fluent through this effective curriculum.
While the majority of our resources are focused on developing the fluency transfer system, which supports any learner at its core, we also have secondary priorities. These include training new language groups to adopt this system and become champions for their own languages.
As for the book project and moving forward in partnership with Christine, we are actively seeking funding. Unfortunately, federal funding for Indigenous languages has been cut across the board, which is making it challenging for us to maintain the same momentum we’ve had over the past few years. It’s alarming to see that, despite being in the decade of Indigenous languages and all the talk about reconciliation, this area isn’t being prioritized. Language is at the heart of a people’s identity and is crucial for Indigenous communities to maintain their empowerment and independence in a world that often seeks to assimilate them.
We’re actively looking for additional funding sources to continue this work, even in small parts. Additionally, we’re working on the book project, which we hope will provide a roadmap for other Indigenous communities to move forward. It aims to offer insights into how a language group committed to revitalizing their ancestral language has approached the task, sharing lessons learned and strategies that might benefit others.
We’ll be working on that as time goes on. For both Christine and me, it’s important, but it’s also crucial not to rush it. There’s a lot to be gained from a long-term partnership, and creating this curriculum is a significant commitment. It always takes more time than you expect, especially as you progress to the more advanced levels, which can be exponentially more complex.
Creating materials for advanced students requires even more time, and as part of that journey, we’re starting to experience the needs of intermediate students who need to live in the language in their everyday lives. This represents a significant area of exploration that demands comprehensive programming and additional resources. It requires support from our governments, self-governing nations, community gatherings, and children’s programs to create spaces where we can fully immerse ourselves in the language.
We’re really reaching a point in our community where we’re asking ourselves what living in the language looks like and requesting that those around us make space for it. Learning the language is a significant commitment, but it’s not enough on its own. To truly empower our people and future generations, the language needs to be lived and used in everyday life.
We need to be living in our languages and our laws, fully immersed in the language that originates from this land. I think many people don’t even have access to an understanding of what that would look like or grasp the full scope of it, especially given the level of disruption we’re experiencing right now.
So, I’m hopeful that as we come over that mountain and see the light at the end of the tunnel, we’ll be able to direct more energy toward creating those spaces and ways of being. I believe that one crucial step in this process is having educational institutions that represent and exist in our languages as well.
You never know. Christine’s experience as a university professor might really support us in building systems like that in the future.
We hope you enjoyed the interview and found valuable insights to enhance your community-university initiatives.