In almost every regulatory hearing in which I participated, First Nations representatives would offer testimony knowing that there was little that we could do to repair the breeches, real or imagined, in their relationship with the federal government of Canada. Their strategy seemed to be “throw it all at the wall and hope that some of it sticks.” We did, eventually, find some creative ways to put their grievances in front of the people in the government who could offer relief, but we had no way of forcing such relief.
While this created some frustration and tension in the hearings, it also opened the door to some fascinating discussions about worldview differences between First Nations and White cultures in Canada. I was surprised by the deep understanding by the indigenous intervenors of worldview and the connection between worldview and language. Virtually every intervenor who addressed on-reserve sociological problems connected those problems to the loss of their languages as a secondary effect of the reserve school system.
It is not for me to assess the reasons for the loss of indigenous languages. I doubt that it was due to residential school policies because I have indigenous friends who only speak English and never set foot in a residential school. The problem is deeper than this current bugbear. But the insistence on the importance of language in the formation of worldview is an intriguing consideration.
(istockphoto.com)
All the people who intervened made their argument in English and, for a good portion of these people English was the only language they knew. This, to them, is a problem. A working knowledge of Cree or other indigenous language was not going to further their economic prospects and they never made that argument. Their argument was that until their worldview is repaired by a widespread knowledge of their tribal languages, they will suffer the estrangement of being aliens in an alien world.
Earlier in my life, when I moved to Peru, I had to learn Spanish to conduct business and claim my share at the supper table. Learning the language was an arduous process. During this time, I attended an evangelical church and noticed that I could understand Spanish much better in the context of my faith than in the context of my work. At first, I thought the pastor articulated more clearly than my business counterparts but even the singing was intelligible to me. There seemed to be something about the context in which the Spanish was being spoken that added to my ability to understand it. And that seemed very odd to me.
I discussed this oddity with a good friend who had been raised in the Jesuit tradition and who spent time living and working in other parts of the world. He admitted to a similar experience in the travail of learning first German in Berlin and then Hebrew in Jerusalem. His grasp of German, he said, was always improved when attending mass. His understanding of Hebrew was much improved while attending Yeshiva.
As an aside, I had a big laugh when he told me that at the 4 ½ year mark in his five-year rabbinical training he was pulled out of class by the academic dean to discuss the process and ceremony required for him to leave his Catholicism and be inducted into Judaism. Somewhat surprised he responded that he saw himself as a Catholic rabbi. He was politely asked to leave. He laughed with me and said that he didn’t regret the time in Yeshiva as it gave him significant insights into his own faith. Alfredo is quite a guy/goyim.
A dataset with two entries proves exactly nothing but it is an interesting dataset, nevertheless. And it seems to correlate with the worldview arguments of the indigenous intervenors. Academic literature is full of papers that draw a direct and tight linkage between worldview and religion. My interlocutors at the regulatory hearings were using language to get back to their ancestral religious practices. They were united in their belief that they could not practice “the old ways” without first resurrecting the languages that gave meaning to those old ways. Are the indigenous languages necessary for First Nations people to live productively in a western culture? They think so. They think that if they want to live in western culture while rooted in their ancestral cultures, they also need their ancestral languages. And they believe that their sociological problems are based on a broken culture, so language renewal within their tribes is a high priority for them. I am not so sure, but it is not my argument to make.
The point to all this is that I believe that there is a strong link between culture or worldview and language. As a Christian, I also think this link is inherently spiritual and is somehow tied up in being made in the image of God. According to the book of Genesis, in the early days we all spoke the same language, and this led our forebears to the dumb idea that they could make a name for themselves by building a tower to the heavens. I suppose that means that they decided to usurp God by making their way to His domain without bothering to involve Him in the adventure. As a result, God destroyed the tower, confounded the language into several languages and scattered the people.
I have no way of knowing whether this really happened but I choose to believe that it did. Either way, it doesn’t change the allegorical richness of the story. Being made in the image of God is another way of saying “can communicate in order to create”. Language is the gift we humans have by virtue of being image bearers. If this is so then language is clearly spiritual and fundamental to culture. Language was the gift of God and is not evolutionary. Languages were created out of a failed culture.
For several years, I volunteered to lead weekly chapel services in a local prison and our services drew predominantly from the indigenous community. That their culture is in trouble is attested by the fact that First Nations people represent 14 percent of Canada’s general population yet close to 50 percent of the prison population. I spoke with a lot of the guys who came out about the role of language in their spiritual development, and they all agreed that they felt broken by their inability to communicate in their own languages. None of them blamed their incarceration on this inability (as always, their problems were blamed on the ubiquitous residential school excuse) but they all had the same sense of brokenness. Another excuse to let drunken parents off the hook? Perhaps but I did know some indigenous folks who, in learning their languages, managed to defeat alcoholism and drug addictions. I think the discipline of learning the language was the secret to their success but maybe discipline is the twofer that God gives along with the learning of language. I don’t know.
These might be interesting personal observations but so what. Is there any significance to this? I think there is, but it is tied to a worldview that is linked to belief in God. There is no question in my mind that language in the once-Christian West is coarsening. By coarsening, I mean language that is “unrepresentative of the truth”. We lie a lot and are being lied to even more. Does this imply that we are moving closer to being true image bearers of God or further from the One whose image we bear? Are there consequences to moving away from God? The story of the Tower of Babel would suggest that there are significant, unhappy consequences. But what could those consequences be today?
I think the answer to that question may lie in understanding the decrease in scientific and social creativity in the western world and the phenomenon of large language artificial intelligence models. The decrease in creativity was foretold by Dr. Francis Schaeffer in the late 1980’s and alarm bells were rung by Professor Alan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” in the early 1990s.
I will offer a thesis in my next substack so you can decide for yourselves and leave a comment. We truly live in interesting times.