Languages Are Multiple
From Turtle Island to Africa – Combatting the Cultural Violence of Colonialism in Residential School and Christian Missionary School
In: New Framings on Anti-Racism and ResistanceSearch for other papers by Christina Hutchinson in
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Hutchinson argues that Indigenous peoples actively resist the violence of the imperial doctrine. This chapter engages in a “contrapuntal” reading (Said, 1993) that accounts for both the oppression of Indigenous language and culture as well as how Indigenous languages and cultures have adapted to resist colonial oppression. Hutchison critiques Canadian residential schooling and Christian missionary education as imperial systems that devalue Indigenous knowledges through cultural appropriation. Through an assessment of the inability of Canadian Law to preserve Indigenous language, Hutchison applies Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s argument of the “colonial child” to assess the psychological manifestations of cultural loss. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the fluidity of Indigenous languages through the examination of the African diasporic and migratory contexts where Indigenous peoples incorporate and blend their histories through adaptive and transformative language strategies called “urban vernaculars” (Makoni, 2007). These discussions prove that Indigenous languages have survived and resisted imperial indoctrination, and that Indigenous ways of knowing are necessary to replace (not transform) the colonial academy (Dei, 2011).