[Witness speaks in Maliseet]
[English]
My name is Andrea Bear Nicholas. I am from the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, and I've been teaching as the St. Thomas University chair in native studies for 20 years. I'm very grateful for this opportunity to speak with you.
As chair in native studies at St. Thomas, I began working over 25 years ago with a group of Maliseet families to publish nearly 5,000 pages of stories in our language, which had been recorded by a non-indigenous academic between 1970 and 1983. From 1994 to 2004, we worked with the collector to publish these stories. When he offered to sell the 37 original, large, double-sided tapes to the families for $4,000, they agreed to pay him, but only on condition that he surrender copyright to the families, otherwise they wouldn't be able to use them.
He signed such an agreement and was paid his price, but subsequently changed his mind. Since Canadian copyright law gives copyright to those who record stories rather than to those who tell them, he refused to allow the families to publish the stories except under his sole copyright. For the families this would have been tantamount to surrendering claim to the oral traditions of their elders, and they could not bring themselves to do it.
I and the families subsequently spent three years and $30,000 in legal fees trying to negotiate with the collector. The families were even willing to publish the stories under a joint copyright with the collector, but he refused even that. In the end, his lawyer stopped responding to our lawyer. Consequently, the families made the difficult decision not to publish the stories at all, fearing the real possibility of being sued under section 18 of the Canadian Copyright Act.
A moment is needed here to explain how detrimental this has been for my language, Maliseet, which is said to have only 60 lifelong speakers out of nearly 7,000 people. Like most indigenous languages in Canada, ours is in fact deemed to be critically endangered, which is the last category before becoming extinct according to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. When I received a sizable SSHRC grant in 2010 to investigate the effectiveness of adult immersion in revitalizing an endangered language, we were prohibited by Canadian copyright law from using both the tapes and the transcriptions that we had made from the tapes.
When the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT, learned of this appalling situation, they helped us to publish the first volume of stories and promised to provide legal support in case we were sued. We now actually look forward to being sued, so that the matter might be settled in court.
We are aware that songwriters do not lose rights to their songs when someone else records them, and we ask only for the same right to be guaranteed to storytellers, particularly indigenous storytellers, who are the keepers of our intellectual and cultural heritage. For anthropologists, linguists, and others, however, Canadian copyright law has served as the perfect tool for stealing and exploiting our intellectual and cultural heritage, rather than for protecting it and promoting the survival of indigenous cultures.
One of the calls to action in the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on the federal government to fully adopt and implement the 2008 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in 2016 the Government of Canada declared its intention to do so. Article 11 of the declaration declares that indigenous peoples must have the right to “practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs”, including “the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures”.
There can be no question that the oral and written versions of our stories are manifestations of our culture, and there is no question that the theft of these traditions has had a destructive impact on our ability as Maliseets to revitalize our language and culture.
The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission declares that reconciliation “requires constructive action on addressing the ongoing legacies of colonialism that have had destructive impacts on Aboriginal peoples' education, cultures and languages....”
Residential schools may no longer exist in Canada, but many destructive legacies of colonialism still exist and actually reinforce each other. That our language is in such a critical state is not so much the consequence of residential schools, since very few of our children were actually sent to one; it is the consequence of being forced, generation after generation, to send our children to schools conducted in the medium of English rather than in the medium of our own language. Since section 18 of the Canadian Copyright Act effectively legalizes the theft of our stories, the right of our children to the oral traditions of their people has been, and still is, doubly denied.
Unless this country moves quickly to remove these legacies of colonialism in its laws and policies, our language and most other indigenous languages in Canada will soon be extinct, and the promise of truth and reconciliation will be meaningless. I sincerely hope this will not be the case.
Woliwon. Thank you.