Discover the Blackfoot Culture Despite decades of harsh government policies designed to destroy their languages and institutions, Canada’s indigenous people are managing to preserve some of what makes them unique – their words.
classroom to the library, the coffee shop to the world’s highest tech science facilities. And, while these efforts are piecemeal and often struggle to find funding, there are many determined people involved whose work is having a cumulative effect.
When a language disappears, so do pieces of the collective memory of the culture that speaks it, as with environmental knowledge produced over hundreds or even thousands of years.
Today, for example, it is not uncommon to hear Blackfoot being spoken at coffee shops, and the City of Lethbridge has adopted the Blackfoot hello ‘Oki’ as its official civic greeting.
The Innu language of the arctic, for example, has many more concepts for ‘snow’ than you find in English. It’s not hard to understand that for people who spent more than half their lives on snow and ice without motorized transport, understanding variations in “snow” would be important. Making your igloo out of collapsible snow could be detrimental to one’s health.
A high school teacher in Strathmore produced a Blackfoot play after learning the stories contained in the art at ‘Writing On Stone’ park could no longer be read with authority, because for so long the government refused to allow natives to access the site, and the visual language knowledge was lost.
Members of Alberta and Montana’s Blackfoot Confederacy also believe their languages contain knowledge and content crucial to their thriving as a people, and so efforts are being undertaken to preserve and restore their language – from the
One of the earliest promoters of restoring the many dialects of Blackfoot, Daryl Kipp, noted that the names for many plants in the region had been lost, and with it the knowledge of what that plant might be good for, from food to medicine. Kipp started the Piegan Institute in Montana when they were
Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly Courtesy National Public Radio / Russell Barber
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