Indigenous Success Stories

Language and Culture (13-17)

Tessa Ericson, Nak’azdi Whut’en First Nation

January 7, 2018

Williams Lake Tribune – Creating an application and organizing a summer camp to help get younger people in her central BC community speaking the Nak’azdi dialect of the Dakelh language. Members were fluent in the dialect about three generations ago before the advent of residential schools. “A huge amount of local understanding of culture, ecology, relationship with ancestors, with the past and with the land id all encoded in language” Mark Turin, chairperson of the First Nations and endangered languages program at UBC.