If you don’t know the language, you can’t understand the culture.
– Ralph Porter, Gjoa Haven, Nunavut.
Another thing I dislike hearing about is that we lost, we lost our heritage, we lost our language. Let’s examine that for a minute. What is language? Where does it come from?… language is a gift from the Creator for the purpose of communication and any gift of the Creator you as well as myself know that it can never deteriorate… all we have to do is to dust it off
– Pete Sidney, Tlingit Elder
1991 Yukon Aboriginal Languages Conference
Language and culture are inherently related and often bound together in discussions of northern development and change. To study language is to study culture, and vice versa. It is not uncommon to hear expressions like, “when language dies, culture dies” spoken. But how accurate is this statement? Are language and culture the same thing?
Dene love songs:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/northbeat-archives-dene-love-songs-1.3446982
Resources:
