Miss New Brunswick sings to wake the 'sleeping' Wolastoqey language
CBC
Wearing her Miss New Brunswick sash, Heaven Solomon enthusiastically introduces herself in Wolastoqey as Heaven or Healing Sunshine.
She fell in love with her language as a child and says she finds a way to incorporate it into everything she does.
Solomon is at the forefront of a movement to revive the threatened Wolastoqey language in New Brunswick, a part of the country that is bucking a worrisome national trend of declining Indigenous speakers.
She is a language teacher at the Mah-Sos kindergarten to Grade 5 school in Neqotkuk, or Tobique First Nation, and hopes to use her new crown to inspire others to learn their Indigenous language, and to use it.
"To be Miss New Brunswick means that I have the opportunity to share my language," Solomon said.
"It means that I also have the responsibility to hopefully inspire other Indigenous youth to … maybe try things they are not used to, to do things that might make them nervous because I was so nervous for the pageant."
Solomon is one of a growing number of people in Canada who didn't grow up speaking their Indigenous language as their mother tongue, but have gone on to learn it as an additional language.
New numbers from Statistics Canada show that the overall number of Indigenous language speakers in the country dropped by about 4 per cent between 2016 and 2021.
In New Brunswick, however, the number increased by 3.5 per cent.
Chris Penney, director of the Centre for Indigenous Statistics and Partnerships with Statistics Canada, says there are about 750 Wolastoqey speakers in New Brunswick, and 2,500 Mi'kmaw speakers.
Penney says in Canada, even though the number of people who speak an Indigenous language as their mother tongue has declined, the effect is being counteracted by more people learning Indigenous languages as an additional language.
"There is growth in the number of Indigenous second-language speakers," he said of the latest census data.
"The numbers of people who could speak an Indigenous language, but did not have an Indigenous mother tongue, grew by 7 per cent."
