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Contemporary Indigenous peoples in Alberta belong to one of
three language families: Algonquian, Athapaskan and Siouan.
Recent scholarship has modified Sapir's famous paper in 1929
that grouped the many languages in North Americal into 12
middle-level stocks and then six "superstocks," but the
trend towards linking tribes and cultural groups through
language was firmly established and still constitutes the
primary modus operandi of comprehending linkages behind the
diversity. Apart from this, our case for using language as a
basis for drawing out legal concepts rests on three
foundations:
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The role and significance of storytelling as the premier
mode of embodying the truths of Nature's Law
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Aboriginal claims that language is essential to comprehend
cultural affirmations such as sacred beliefs, more values
and notions of law and
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Language remains one of those basic ingredients of society.
The Importance of
Tone
Interviewer - Earle Waugh, PhD.
One characteristic of language is that it does not destroy
concepts and crucial words even when the concepts are not
used in every day discourse. Words remain, even if the
conceptual framework move on to another way of speaking. In
this way, legal-type language still is available for piecing
together the main directions used to affirm norms and customs.
The Power of the Cree
Language to Communicate With the Earth
Interviewer - Earle Waugh, PhD.
"… the need for flexibility and to be in communication with
the world-as-event may account for the fact that Athapaskan
languages stress action verbs so heavily. Even the nouns
tend to be nominalized verbs [see Krauss and Golla 1981;
compare Witherspoon 1977] … there can be enormous
discrepancies of meaning arising from the categorical
discreteness and concreteness that English imposes, which is
altogether absent from the Dene language and thought"
(Smith, World as Event 73).
"The world of a dominantly oral or oral-aural culture is
dynamic and relatively unpredictable, and event-world rather
than an object-world. What we are getting at here can be
understood in terms of the nature of sound as compared to
other sensory perceptions. Sound is of itself necessarily an
event in the way in which the object of no other sense is" (Ong
637).
"An oral culture, we must remind ourselves, is one in
which nothing can be ‘looked up.’ Words are sounds, and
sounds exist only as they are going out of existence. I
cannot stop a word as I can a moving picture in order to fix
my attention on an immobilized part of it. There are no
immobilized parts of sound. If I stop sound, I have only its
opposite, silence. An oral culture is deeply aware of this
evanescent quality of words. Homer expresses this awareness
when he sings of ‘wingèd words.’ At the same time, oral
cultures consider words more powerful than we do, probably
in the last analysis because whereas we interpret movement
as instability, they are keenly of the moment of sound as
signaling use of power" (Ong 638-639). |
