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COURSE INFORMATION

Language in First Nations Culture

LING 186 (1.5 Units)

This course provides an intensive examination of the ways in which language is embedded in the cultural heritage and social context of a selected community, with a focus on oral history, including legends, song, dance, and cultural practices, methods, and protocols, along with the impacts and implications of social change on language.

Participants bring the experiences of language and culture from their own heritage nto the learning environment of the course. Ultimately, exploring the experiences from different communities enables participants to consider both common denominators in language and cultural relationship as well as strategies in dealing with language and cultural revitalization.

Topics include:

• Definitions of language
• Definitions of culture
• The importance of language to culture
• Language and world view
• Language use in song, dance, art, history and geography
• Natural language shift vs. radical language change
• Possible results on a culture when it experiences radical language shift over a relatively short period of time
• Historical and contemporary states of First Nations languages and cultures
• Language, politics and power
• First Nations cultural and linguistic revitalization at the turn of the twenty-first century
• Realistic strategies for success in First Nations linguistic and cultural revitalization

Instructor

Marianne Nicolson is a member of the Dzawada’enuxw Tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations who reside on the coastal mainland of British Columbia. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and a MFA in Visual Art from the University of Victoria. As an artist her work has been shown both nationally and internationally at venues such as the National Indian Art Centre, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Jordan National Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Most recently, she opened a solo exhibition at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver B.C. in January 2006. Her artworks are contemporary expressions of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw concepts. Due to an emerging belief that these concepts could be better understood through comprehension of the Kwak’wala language and a growing concern over the endangered status of this indigenous language she engaged in linguistic and anthropological study at the University of Victoria where she completed an Interdisciplinary MA in 2005.

Currently she is engaged in PhD research involving the conceptualization of space and time in Kwakwaka’wakw language and art and the importance of indigenous language to indigenous worldview.

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