From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Iroquoians/Alexander Von Gernet
By the 1840s a number of schools operated by the Church of England (the New England Company) offered formal education to Six Nations children. Attendance was apparently irregular since some parents regarded the schools as a threat to Iroquois traditions. One of the first, the Mohawk Institute, became a residential school and remained so until 1970.
As early as the 1870s Iroquois chiefs had at least some say in local educational policy at the Six Nations territory and a few Iroquois people were employed as teachers. Nevertheless, speaking in Iroquoian languages was forbidden and going to school was often a humiliating experience. School attendance was made compulsory in 1920. In the 1990s there has been a devolution of responsibility for education from the Department of Indian Affairs to the Six Nations community, although painful memories of the residential school system still linger.
The Huron language is now extinct, although ethnolinguists have laboriously reconstructed a rudimentary vocabulary and grammar from early French-Huron dictionaries. Today, the Huron at Lorette speak French. The Petun spoke the same dialect as the Attignawantan Huron. The Huron name for the Neutral, Attiouendaronk (“they who understand the language”), suggests that the now extinct Neutral dialects were closely related to Huron.
While the five Iroquois languages are not extinct, they are certainly endangered since fluency in them is restricted primarily to elders. Based on figures provided to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1992, of the 16,443 people officially registered on the rolls of the Grand River territory of the Six Nations, only 285 (1.7 percent) spoke one of the Iroquois languages fluently. Of these, 246 (86.3 percent) were Cayuga, Mohawk, and Onondaga over the age of fifty.
There are signs of hope for Iroquoian languages. While English remains the language of instruction in many facilities, including the Kahnawake Survival School, native language instruction has been added to the curriculum of certain schools. In 1970 some Six Nations elementary schools taught fifteen minutes of Cayuga or Mohawk. Such initiatives evolved into immersion programs, and by 1990 enrolment represented 15 percent of the total elementary school population. Today, most schools at Six Nations offer instruction in at least one Iroquois language. Academic institutions such as the Centre for Research and Teaching of Canadian Native Languages at the University of Western Ontario have done much to rejuvenate Iroquois languages. A number of dictionaries and grammars on various dialects have also been published in recent decades.
Iroquois newspapers have come and gone, although Akwesasne Notes (Rooseveltown, New York, 1968– ), “The Official Publication of the Mohawk Nation,” has served as a forum for the promotion of an Iroquois consciousness for many decades and has had subscribers from all over North America. In 1995 it evolved from a newsprint format to a glossy quarterly magazine. Other papers, such as Tekawennake (Ohsweken, Ontario, 1970– ) and the Turtle Island News (Ohsweken, 1994– ), reach readers at Six Nations and provide an aboriginal perspective on local, regional and national events as well as lifestyles, food, sports, arts, and business. The Eastern Door (Kahnawake, Quebec, 1991– ) does the same for Kahnawake. Iroquois intellectuals have also written books and pamphlets. One of the most popular is A Basic Call to Consciousness (1978), a traditionalist manifesto that has become an influential text in an emerging Iroquois cultural nationalism.
English is the language of Iroquois media, including local radio stations. It is also the language of most prose and poetry. The various versions of the “Iroquoian Cosmology,” published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1903 and 1928, as well as the “Huron-Wyandot Traditional Narratives” published by the National Museum of Canada in 1960, are rare examples of texts recorded in the original languages. Yet the lack of widespread fluency has precluded the development of a significant corpus of published literature in any of the Iroquoian languages. Even Chief Jacob Thomas’s recent “Teachings from the Longhouse,” while based on an Onondaga script, is available only in English translation.
