Dr. Lorena Sekwan Fontaine advances Indigenous language rights

For Dr. Lorena Sekwan Fontaine [LLB/00, PhD/18], research on Indigenous language rights began with community.

Fontaine, who is Cree and Anishinaabe and a member of Sagkeeng First Nation, was attending a conference with her mother in Vancouver when she walked into a room filled with lawyers, government officials, church representatives and Elders.  

The room was tense. Elders had just been told there was little that could be done for the loss of language and culture in residential school claims because Indigenous language rights were not recognized in Canadian constitutional law in the same way as English and French.

“I was a bit taken back and really upset that our people are being told that we didn’t have language rights in our own territories, in our own land,” Fontaine says.

She spoke up at the conference and was later offered a position working on what became the Baxter National Residential School Class Action.

That moment stayed with her. It also made her think about her own family.

Fontaine did not grow up speaking Ojibwe or Cree, her ancestral languages. On her mother’s side, her grandparents spoke only Cree, and she often needed translation when she was home in community.  

Later, she learned that when her grandparents saw their children losing Cree after returning from residential school, they hid some of them on the trapline so they could be immersed in language and culture. 

“People risked their freedom because they knew how important the language and culture are,” Fontaine says.

Those experiences continue to guide Fontaine’s work as a scholar, lawyer, educator and advocate. Now Professor and Department Head of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba, she is internationally recognized for her research on Indigenous language rights, residential school redress and the concept of “linguicide.”

“There’s inequality in Canada around language rights for Indigenous peoples,” Fontaine says. “I believe that very Indigenous person has a right to go to school and be educated in their own language if that’s what they want.” 

Fontaine has carried that argument into policy and public conversation. She has testified before the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples on the Indigenous Languages Act, served as a Canada Fulbright Research Chair in Indigenous Studies and published widely on Indigenous language rights.

She has also helped develop a new micro-diploma in Cree and Ojibwe, along with plans for an Indigenous language centre and digital media lab that would support the recording of fluent speakers, especially Elders, to document pronunciation, intonation, body language and everyday speech for future learners.

“At UM, we’re trying to create pathways of language learning, but also meeting the needs of the community,” Fontaine says. 

Receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award has been humbling, she says, especially because the nomination came with support from colleagues and former professors. But she sees the recognition as part of a much longer story.

“I bring this back to the people who have inspired me,” Fontaine says. “All the language advocates that I’ve worked with along the way.”