20 Years of CILLDI

The year is 2000. Fifteen students are gathered in a classroom in Onion Lake, an Indigenous reserve on the border of Alberta and…

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The year is 2000. Fifteen students are gathered in a classroom in Onion Lake, an Indigenous reserve on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, waiting for their first class in Cree Language and Culture to begin. While there had been many avenues for them to study Cree at their respective universities, this course promised something unique:

It would be taught in Cree.

Fast forward 20 years to 2019, and this is still one of the many things that makes CILLDI, or the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute, an utterly unique and unforgettable experience for its students.

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Photos from the first CIILDI cohort in 2000. Left: Honoured Guest Dr. Freda Ahenakew. Centre: First Nations Curriculum Developer Mary Cardinal Collins. Right: Instructor Donna Paskemin || Photos supplied.

CILLDI began as a joint venture between the University of Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan. Bringing together the faculties of Native Studies, Arts, and Education, it was designed to follow in the footsteps of AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute), which was started at the University of Arizona in 1978, in an effort to revitalize and promote the use of Indigenous languages across generations.

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Sally Rice, co-founder of CILLDI || Photo supplied.

“We wanted to do something comparable up here,” co-founder Sally Rice, says. Rice co-founded the program with Heather Blair and Donna Paskemin, who collectively oversaw its development in CILLDI’s early years.

CILLDI quickly outgrew its small community in Onion Lake, and within a year, the program had doubled in size to thirty students, and increased its course offerings from one to five. By 2003, student enrollment had increased to 96 participants across six courses, including courses in Dene. To accommodate this growth, the program was moved to the U of A full-time.

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Rice, Blair, and Paskemin had their work cut out for them; Cree would prove to be a difficult language to teach in a classroom setting, due to its distinct differences from English. Applying an “off-the-shelf ESL model” wouldn’t work because, unlike English, Cree places a bigger emphasis on verbs rather than nouns, and tends to have more oral than written applications.

“Names for things are just a tiny portion of linguistic expression in these languages,” Rice said. “These expressions aren’t about things, they’re about relationships.”

They had to rethink traditional language education models, orienting CILLDI’s coursework towards connective language, the study of the verb, and being less particular about things like spelling, which does not have the same implications in Cree that it does in English and other languages.

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“The impetus behind CILLDI was to provide university level training to teachers and speakers in communities who had otherwise exhausted their tribal funding for university,” Rice explains.

This impetus eventually manifested itself in the Community Language Certificate, which was introduced in 2007, the same year CILLDI took a major step forward after receiving an increase in funding through a Canadian Heritage grant. Enrollment jumped to 126, and CILLDI was now able to offer ten courses to its participants.

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CILLDI Class of 2017 || Photo supplied.

Now in 2019, twenty years into CILLDI’s incumbency, the program has seen over 2000 enrollments and has awarded nearly 100 students the Communicant Linguist Certificate through the Faculty of Arts.

The future of CILLDI is bright, as its integral role to its students and faculty, as well as the U of A community at large, remains as important as ever. Rice speculates that the program will have to adapt as more and more of its prospective students become heritage language learners rather than previously fluent speakers. But with its robust, community-driven model, it should be no surprise when CILLDI continues to grow and thrive for many more years yet to come.