Introducing: Dialogues Youth Vancouver

Dialogues Youth Vancouver aims to promote sustained dialogue among First Nations, Urban Aboriginal and immigrant/non-Aboriginal youth. Three ways in which Dialogues Youth hopes to do this are by challenging and demystifying stereotypes, celebrating cultural differences, and exploring shared interests.

As a result of the Vancouver Dialogues Project, an initiative delivered by the City of Vancouver in partnership with 27 diverse community organizations comprising the project's steering group, Dialogues Youth Vancouver has been developed as a community-led engagement initiative - driven by youth for youth. Using new technologies and various social media tools, the project hopes to engage a large audience of youth between the ages of 17 and 25.

The project's developers intend to facilitate dialogue both online and offline. The purpose of using a web-based engagement campaign in concert with an offline strategy is so that feedback generated online might inform the topics, themes, speakers and outcomes of the offline engagements. The project is designing a series of dialogue sessions and a conference in June 2012 to address and challenge issues being faced by many youth today.

From the Dialogues Youth website:

"We value community, accessibility, self-determination, representation, and equity. We also value dialogue for challenging discrimination, systemic oppression, and colonialism--as well as sharing strengths and celebrating our cultures. Through dialogue, we believe that youth can influence history.

We hope to build alliances between Vancouver’s First Nations, Urban Aboriginal and immigrant/non-Aboriginal  youth. We want to learn your goals. What is your vision for an inclusive Vancouver? How do you define inclusiveness and accessibility? What does self-determination look like to you? How would you like to be represented by your leaders? When will you feel equity in your city?

Through a series of Dialogues Youth Sessions and a conference in June 2012, we hope to answer these questions. However, we need your help. Follow us and join the conversation."

Dialogues Youth depends on community engagement to inform the dynamics of the sessions and conference. Through the use of Twitter #hashtags and by signing up to stay in touch, audience members can identify key themes, discussion topics, and relevant issues for youth around the subject of First Nations, Urban Aboriginal and immigrant/non-Aboriginal relationships in Vancouver. Vancouver youth can influence who the project interviews for it's blog posts and who will be speaking to them during Dialogues events.

Remember to connect on Facebook! Stay in touch - Dialogues Youth Vancouver #vandialogues on Twitter.

Technology and 10%: Language Revitalization

What started with a tweet and led to an 8-year plan, Dustin Rivers of the Skwxwú7mesh and Kwakwaka'wakw nations is armed to revitalize his Indigenous Squamish language.

In an article for Pacific Rim magazine, RPM's own Joi T. Arcand talks with Dustin Rivers about his modern take on language revitalization. Arcand shares some remarkable statistics - apparently only 5.1 percent of B.C. First Nations people are fluent speakers of their language, making each language nearly extinct if not extinct already. Of Rivers' Squamish language, he estimates there are only 4 fluent speakers left.

There is also this number: 10 percent. That's what it takes to bring a language back to life. If 1 in 10 members of a Nation are fluent, their language can be saved from extinction.

From Language Warrior:

Rivers has a plan to make that happen. "I have an eight-stage strategy that I'm following, developed by American linguist, Joshua Fishman. His strategy helps you identify where your language is on the scale, so you can appropriately accomplish the next step." Rivers says that Skwxwú7mesh Sníchim is still in the early stage: getting an adult generation of speakers who act as language apprentices, and as bridges between elders and the youth. He says, "if we're there and we start creating newspapers in Squamish or writing books in Squamish, they're not going to be entirely useful until there are people who are able to read them." He says that time and resources spent on producing written learning tools could be better used to address the issue of where the language is at now, and getting it to the next level, which is creating an integrated group of active speakers where the language is used habitually or exclusively.

Rivers incorporates a language-learning method called Where Are Your Keys (WAYK) - a method he learned about after posting on Twitter that he wanted to learn his language within a set timeframe. The tweet came across the the radar of the WAYK developers - Portland, Oregon, based Evan Gardner and Willem Larson - who reached out to Rivers that they knew a way.

...Gardner describes WAYK as "an open-source, community-based method designed to accelerate the language-learning process." The game incorporates sign language, special rules, and techniques that help transfer language faster from one person to another. A typical game has players sit around a table where they interact with simple objects, such as rocks, sticks and pens. Players learn by passing questions and answers about the objects back and forth.

Larson and Gardner had been working with First Nation communities in Oregon and Washington for about 10 years when they began to develop a larger web presence...

"We emailed [Rivers] and said we know a way. Any community that actually wants to bring their language back just needs to have someone that says, 'Okay, I'll do it'."

Dustin Rivers has become to go-to person for learning the Squamish language. He has organized weekly language nights, immersion gatherings, a podcast and SquamishLanguage.com, coining the term for himself "language revitalization activist". You could say he isn't just talking the talk, but talking is the aim of his actions.

Read the whole story at langara.bc.ca/prm.

Portraits from the Squamish Powwow 2011

This past weekend marked the 24th year of the Squamish Nation Youth Pow Wow. It was 30 years before that when the annual event had been forced into oblivion as the nation's children were sent to residential schools and the elders passed away.

Sunny Dhillon wrote in Rhythm nation: Squamish youth celebrate tradition with 24th annual powwow [The Globe and Mail]:

In the mid-1980s, [Gloria] Nahanee regularly took her two daughters to events at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre. She would occasionally speak with people who remembered the Squamish Nation powwows and encouraged her to start them back up.

She listened...

“I can’t believe it’s 24 years already. After five years, it was like holy cow. And then 10 years. And now it’s like 24th annual? It’s so amazing,” the event organizer said.

The event draws thousands of visitors and performers from across Turtle Island - "a far cry from the inaugural celebration when the performers were essentially [Ms. Nahanee] and her daughters."

Farah Nosh captured beautiful portraits - see the whole set here.

Also, YouTube user cyberska has a number of fantastic videos up, like this one of the Women's Fancy Crowhop:

Indigenous Language Revitalization Movement

There are some amazing events taking place in revitalizing our Indigenous languages. Hip-hop, Twitter and text messaging are playing an integral part in this movement.

We recently wrote about Tall Paul and his bilingual  track “Prayers in a Song”, which blends English and Anishnaabemowin.

IndigenousTweet pointed us to the Bellingham Herald's article Hip-hop, texting may help save world's languages. Youth are key stakeholders in whether a language is used and passed down, or rejected, but in Mexico, teenagers have been texting in Huave, a language spoken by only 15,000 people in the Tehuantepec region, along the Pacific.

Youth in other areas around the globe are using their language similarly.

To the North, Digital Indigenous Democracy is a remarkable endeavour that will bring interactive digital media to eight remote Baffin Island Inuit communites - communities whose 4,000 year-old oral language will become extinct without digital media to carry it forward into the next generation.

Cultural Survival recently organized the National Native Languages Revitalization Summit in Washington D.C with the goal of "engaging every one of the 62 members of the House and Senate appropriations committees with Native language revitalization success stories, along with justifications for additional federal support."

Rosebud Sioux and South Dakota-based programmer Biagio Arobba created the user-generated content site LiveAndTell, crowdsourcing audio and audio-tagged images. The content so far is largely from the Lakota language but the intention encompasses all Indigenous languages. In an interview with Paul Glader the main thing in language preservation, Arobba says, "is just lowering the barriers and the costs for everybody."

With that in mind, low-tech can also have an impact. InsideVancouver brought our attention to a great new print dictionary - Squamish For Dummies: Cool New Squamish-English Dictionary.

The Squamish language, like many of B.C.’s Aboriginal languages, suffered a near fatal hit in the last century as a result of the residential school system.  For decades, young Squamish students were forcibly sent away to residential schools, where they were strictly forbidden from speaking their own language.  Even today, many elders are reluctant to speak the traditional language owing to this legacy of abuse.

This is, as we know, a heartbreaking truth for many of our languages and communities across Turtle Island. But these local and global projects, along with the actions of youth, are an inspiring, growing movement.

Here's a dose of that inspiration from Dustin Rivers' project SquamishLanguage.com: Word of the Day: Lhx̱áy̓tstn by SquamishLanguage