Ensuring a Future for Indigenous Languages in Canada: Can ‘Consequentialist’ Multinational Federalism Provide an Answer?

Abstract

This chapter employs the concept of ‘consequentialist’ multinational federalism as a means to assess the current state of federal, provincial and territorial measures to protect Indigenous languages in Canada. In arriving at its assessment, this chapter first explores past practices aimed at assimilating Indigenous Peoples and recent calls for action in Indigenous language matters, and, in so doing, provides the contextual backdrop for this chapter’s discussion. Second, the chapter provides a summary of the breadth and limitations of existing Indigenous language rights protections at the federal, provincial and territorial, and treaty, levels. Third, and following from the previous point, the chapter offers preliminary insight into what ‘symbolic’, and more importantly, ‘consequentialist’ multinational solutions might look like in response to calls for action in Indigenous language matters and in redressing the limitations of existing federal, territorial and provincial Indigenous language rights protections. This chapter concludes that ‘consequentialist’ multinational solutions to protecting and preserving Indigenous languages would entail, as preconditions, strengthening Indigenous sovereignty through treaties and enshrining nation-to-nation negotiation but that, for a number of reasons, these solutions might be difficult to achieve.

The authors of this manuscript are non-Indigenous and write from a settler’s perspective. As allies of Indigenous Peoples, they seek to identify ways Canadian federalism can be adapted to increase the vitality of Indigenous languages.