Why does safety matter for ILR practitioners?
I believe it’s important to understand, and accept, that many ILR environments start out unsafe. They start out unsafe because of historical trauma; because Indigenous people carry so much fear, shame, and pain around language loss.
They also start out unsafe because many ILR efforts are forced to exist within colonial systems that are inherently hostile to Indigenous people.
To be clear, Indigenous control doesn’t make “education” safer. It can, but it doesn’t change that Indigenous people have an ongoing, multigenerational traumatic experience that impacts their psychobiological responses to schooling.
And sometimes Indigenous control makes things worse. Internalized oppression and lateral violence can intensify when you give power to traumatized people.
This is the importance of understanding embodied experience and how trauma manifests over generations. The lack of safety is embedded in the system, and it shows up in how we treat each other.
I know some readers will want to protest and point out the exceptions. (There are always exceptions.) I understand. It doesn’t feel good to face that your learning environment might be unsafe. Especially if you had to fight, scrap, and work yourself to the bone just to create it.
Still, continuous exposure to a lack of safety is bad for your wellbeing, your learning, your relationships, and ultimately, your language revitalization effort.
Unsafe environments drain our life force, sap our energy, and cause burnout. You aren’t supposed to revitalize language in a constant state of stress. You aren’t supposed to be walking around all the time with an activated nervous system.
What I suggest is only that you start to think about, talk about, and actively consider how to create and assess safety within your ILR practice, program, or project.
Safety is not easy to define, or socially engineer. While stressors in our environment have a huge influence, safety is ultimately an internal experience. Only ILR practitioners know if a given language revitalization effort feels safe for them.
Not ILR practitioners as a collective, but every single individual practitioner whose life encompass a vast number of variables that might expose, or protect them from, the impacts of personal or historical trauma, the stressors of daily life, and the many challenges of being an Indigenous person.
So, the only way to understand safety, is to also talk about unsafety. Safety isn’t all or nothing. It’s a spectrum and it’s different for every single person. Not all risk, adversity, or even hostility necessarily feels unsafe.
It takes effort to uncover if, and why, we feel unsafe. It can seem like it doesn’t make sense that we are afraid, ashamed, or anxious.
Many ILR practitioners I know are so immersed in crisis and urgency they can’t even feel their own embodied responses. We train ourselves to endure. We learn to keep going no matter what. We ignore when our nervous system activates to tell us we feel unsafe.
Language revitalization should not be an endurance race. Language revitalization should be fun, joyful, restful, and relaxing.
It doesn’t have to be those things all the time, but enough to balance the fear, shame, and pain around language loss. Enough to balance the hostility of colonial systems. That’s what safety feels like.
Reflective Questions:
- How safe is your ILR practice?
- How safe is your ILR learning environment?
- How safe is it for you?
- How safe is it for other people?