Dear ELP,

My community is involved in a campaign to regain access to our lands, as our lands were stolen from us many generations ago – and we are struggling to regain our rights and connection to our lands. I think it would be good to connect this struggle to our language, which has also been historically denied to us. How can I connect these two struggles?
 

-Language and Land

Dear Language and Land,
 

This is a great question! These two struggles are so intertwined and colonization is usually at the root of the issue, so finding ways to actively decolonize by reconnecting to and remembering the ways that the language and land are related will likely be important in your struggle to reclaim both your land and your language.
 

Thinking about the ways that your community maintains connection to your lands through your language across time, from the distant past until now – and the ways you envision being connected in the future – is a great place to begin to do this work.
 

You can think about how your community remembers and stories their connection to their lands by learning, reflecting on, asking about, and listening to the stories, songs, poetry, dances, worldviews, ethical principles and practices, and other cultural ways of knowing and being that are connected to the ways your community is related to your lands.
 

Another way to remember these connections – and to demonstrate your community’s connections, especially in settler-colonial contexts – can be done through community mapping and place names projects. 

You could begin by talking with community members about what they remember their relatives talking about in relation to your community’s lands and the stories that were told about your lands, how they referred to the lands when they spoke about or to them, what kinds of things people did (‘cultural practices’) in certain places – for example, what is/was a certain place known for, what do/did people do there, how do/did people refer to that place or what do/did they call it. Listening to those stories could help you begin to gather together the ways that the lands and the language are interconnected with each other in ways that reach across time and space and memory. 

Paying particular attention to asking community members about their Grandparents or older generations who might remember connections to land and particular places, as well as ways of knowing and talking about the land that call up language, is also a very important part of this work.

Once you get involved in this, you will probably realize you are doing a kind of ‘community research project’! 

Some ideas of questions you could ask community members about their knowledge or memory of your People’s relationship to the land, through connection to the language, might be around asking them about particular places in your community’s lands or territories:

• “What do you remember that place (name of place) being called?”
• “What kinds of things did we do on that land, in that place?”
• “Was there anything that we were not supposed to do or talk about in relation to that land, that place?”
• “Do you remember what that place was called? Has that name changed over time?”
• “What are our people calling that place today? Why is this name important to us – what does it tell us that we need to know about and remember?”
• “When did this place name change? How did it change? Do you remember what happened?”
• (“What are outsiders calling that place today? Is this relevant or meaningful in any way to us? How might this inform our struggle to rename and reclaim our homelands?”) 
• “What kinds of stories do you remember about that place?”
• “What kinds of language do you remember people using in relation to that place?” 

You could also think about looking into place names using historical archives and older maps of your lands to begin to document your community’s historical use of the area and how this is reflected in language you find in archives and historical records. And remember to keep sharing your searches and what you learn along the way in community gatherings, so that not only will other community members know what you are finding, but to encourage coming together to remember collectively, to pull together stories as a community about your lands, your places, your memories, your knowledge about the land and how you interacted with the land in those places, and the ways that all of this is reflected through your language, no matter what stage you are in reclaiming and regenerating your language!

You can also think about this work to reconnect with your lands and your languages as part of a “linguistic landscape,” where you pay attention to the places and spaces where your language is part of the land currently seen or heard – or that is missing from the way that the language is part of the landscape in your area. You might ask yourself questions like, 
 

• “How do the place names of this area reflect our language?” and “How do the place names of this area reflect how we know our land?” 
• “Where are our own place names, in our own language, present?” 
• “Where do the place names reflect the absence or invisibilization of our language and our presence?”
• “How has colonialism / settler-colonialism impacted, erased, contorted our languages, knowledge, and connection to our lands?”
   

These are just a few ideas you could think about doing as you begin your work to reconnect your struggle for language and lands.

The important thing is not to worry about wherever you are starting or where you are going – the most important thing is to just begin. As you begin, you may find that the more people start talking with each other in conversation, the more people begin remembering the ways that your community has been and continues to be connected to your lands through their relationships, collective storying and memory, and cultural ways of being-knowing-doing. All of it is critical to learn and to recognize as you work hard to reconnect with your lands and your language(s) – while remembering that, from Indigenous ways of knowing, the lands and the languages of the land are your birthright and they cannot be separated from you. They are a gift, often a sacred gift from the Creator that cannot be severed, no matter what the historical experience of your community has been. And more than likely, they are awaiting your return to them.
 

-Amanda