Visitor

This work refers to the haunting nature of a large portion of present day first nations spirituality as it relates to the present state of our traditional language, the essence of our historic identity. As a result of noxious lessons learned during their internment within the confines of the now notorious, federal ‘Indian Residential Schools’ of Canada, many first nations people do not speak their mother tongue. Although they may have heard the language being spoken by older people in their communities, in many cases, they themselves were not personally addressed, or expected to verbally respond, in the language. As a result they did not get the verbal practice required to become a fluent speaker of the language.
Directly associated to natural socially imbued fluency in the language, is the culturally turned perspective that is inescapably linked to the language. A perspective that is intrinsic to understanding the community and the traditional mode of conscious and unconscious communication, i.e. intonation, inference and verve that ‘is’ much of the language. Such nuances set any one language apart from another, and lend vivid presentation of the uniqueness of the culture that gave birth to that language.
Those of us who have spent enough time around our community members, listening as they spoke the language but did not part take in speaking the language ourselves, to varying extents, came to possess a limited, though intuitive, insight and grasp of the psycho-textural nature of our culture, and the traditionally acclimatized perspective of our people. So that while we are not able to verbalize our personal expressions through use of our traditional language, we are never the less, haunted by the desire to vocalize such deeply rooted, traditionally styled personal expression.
As a result, when I find myself in the midst of discussion by members of my community, people who are fluent in the Haisla language, I feel like a visitor among my own people.