Mi'kmaq Connected DISE's John Sylliboy with Supervisor Janine Metallic
A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi'kmaq; it changed everything
by Selena Ross CTVNewsMontreal.ca Digital Reporter
MONTREAL -- A very specific milestone passed recently, unnoticed except by those who happened to read a tweet by John Robert Sylliboy on Tuesday.
“I have goosebumps,” he wrote.
Sylliboy had just met with his PhD supervisor at McGill University. They had a long discussion about his research, over Zoom, which is nothing unusual in itself. But there was one extraordinary thing about the meeting: it took place not in English, nor French: it was all in Mi’kmaq -- a potential first, not just on that campus, but any campus. “We just spent 60 minutes speaking in our language,” Sylliboy wrote. “How beautiful is that?”
Sylliboy’s supervisor. Dr. Janine Metallic, has spent countless hours in other dissertation discussions, but she had the same sense of wonder when she switched languages — an immediate sense that speaking Mi’kmaq changed everything. “John and I were talking and all of a sudden, we just… the way we express things is different,” she said. “And there’s no need for explanation. We just kind of have this mutual understanding, and then we can get to the job of doing our work, you know, and our research.”
The offhand tweet was, in fact, a sign of happy longer-term news that most Canadians don’t know, and a clue to how they can try to repair the damage from Canada’s devastating attempted cultural erasures. Many Indigenous languages have begun a rebound in recent years, a process painstakingly nurtured within Indigenous families and schools across the country. Statistics show how successful these efforts have been. But what hasn’t happened yet, at least not much, is bringing those languages out of those small Indigenous communities and into broader Canadian public spaces, whether at universities or libraries, on TV or street signs.
What difference would it make? A huge one, said Metallic, and she increasingly understands why. “It just opens the imagination,” she said.
A Rare Pairing
Cases like Metallic and Sylliboy’s are still extremely unusual, with neither of them aware of any other Mi’kmaq-speaking PhD student and supervisor at any university.
They both now work within McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, but they come from first nations two provinces and nine hours apart.