Dr Lorena Sekwan Fontaine: Linguicide and the Fight for Indigenous Language Rights
When Dr. Lorena Sekwan Fontaine was a child, her aunts and uncles would turn their backs or leave the room whenever they spoke Cree. She thought they were hiding something from her. They were: the language itself, learned the hard way in residential schools, where speaking it meant being hit. That memory sits at the centre of this conversation with Stuart Murray, a wide-ranging look at what Fontaine calls linguicide, the deliberate killing of a language, and what it means for Canada's human rights obligations today.
Fontaine, a lawyer and professor and head of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba, traces her path from a childhood split between English at home and Cree overheard in secret, to a legal career built on the realization that Canadian law had no real framework for what residential school survivors had lost. Section 35 of the Constitution recognized Aboriginal and treaty rights, but on language, she says, it was "an empty box." She and Stuart also dig into why the Indigenous Languages Act, which now folds language rights into Section 35, is a real step forward but still leaves Indigenous language rights far weaker in practice than the constitutionally entrenched rights of English and French speakers, particularly in education.
We're talking:
Why Fontaine resists the term "linguicide" becoming a place where the conversation gets stuck, when the real goal is moving forward
The gap between Section 35's language protections and the constitutionally entrenched rights of English and French speakers
Her own daughter's education, and the choice to enroll her in French immersion when no Cree or Ojibwe option existed
Whether Orange Shirt Day is driving structural change or settling into symbolism
Her vision for twenty-five years from now: Indigenous languages on street signs and spoken at the counter, not just in the classroom
Read Fontaine's book, Living Language Rights: Constitutional Pathways to Indigenous Language Education, and watch the CBC documentary Undoing Linguicide, drawn from her doctoral research.
