Haida Gwaii Online Learning Summer Term 2 2022

HGSE 372 - Language and Cultural Continuity

Instructor: Jaskwaan Bedard

Course schedule: Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:00am to 12:30pm Pacific

To watch a video with Jaskwaan discussing the course, please click here

This course explores language as a means of examining culture and cultural continuity, in Haida Gwaii and throughout colonized spaces, spanning ancient times to the present. Students will explore methods of knowledge translation and transmission; and how cultural knowledge, values, and worldviews are embedded in language and other forms of communication and expression. Using X̱aad Kil—the Old Massett dialect of the Haida language— as a framing device, students will explore the integral connections between language, culture, history, land, health and resilience. Specific topics that will be examined throughout the course include the importance of oral histories; Indigenous political, social and economic systems; repatriation, and language as a tool for cultural resurgence. Ancestral knowledge contained within languages serves as a connective thread woven throughout history: delivering lessons about strength, resurgence, and resilience through stories, cultural teachings, and songs. Language and Cultural Continuity is for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to better understand the importance of language and culture in one’s own identity and understanding of community.