Saskia Van Viegen, our guest blogger this week, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University. Her research and scholarship focus on bi/multilingualism in education.

As I write this post, Canada marks the second National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30, 2022.  The purpose of this day is to recognize and account for historic and ongoing injustices toward Indigenous peoples in Canada, to make visible the dispossession of Indigenous lands and communities by white settler society, and to restore value in Indigenous ways of knowing. 

Toward these purposes, my reflection here is but one layer in locating myself as a white settler in this context, to consider my positioning in relation to Indigenous languages and to engage my responsibility, as a language educator and applied linguist, to support work toward their revival.  Drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars in Canada who generate, articulate and share such knowledge, including, for instance, Jan Hare, Onowa McIvor, Belinda Daniels, Eve Tuck, Donna Patrick and others, I hope to contribute to continued efforts to reverse the gaze and understand how whiteness and monolingual norms have been centred in language education, and to consider the roles and responsibilities of settlers and allies in supporting their work.

I am a white settler Canadian, with roots in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. My mother and father immigrated to Canada with their families after the second world war, leaving behind their experiences of war, destruction, and starvation.  My mother and father landed at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1949 and 1952, respectively, and their families ultimately settled in a working-class community in southern Ontario, a small town on the north coast of Lake Erie.