Same as plenty of other indigenous people in North America, Miali Coley-Sudlovenick believes her native language is fading.
The European colonization caused Inuits to struggle to maintain their language and culture in an environment full of abuse and horrors.
This is why she’s been using the benefits of the internet and teaching Inuktitut, one of the Inuit dialects, to her people and others who want to learn it.
She’s firm that this is pivotal for the survival of her culture.
Language Helps You Identify with Your Culture and People
Coley-Sudlovenick emphasizes that asking why this is pivotal is like asking why water matters. Inuit people need their language and there’s an innate need in all of them that’s looking for a part of themselves to identify with.
She gives people their language and connects them with what they were looking for all along. This is the language she and her people identify with and through the colonization, their parents and ancestors lost the capacity to speak their own language.
According to estimates, there are around 180,000 Inuit globally, most of whom live in Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. Around 65,000 are in Canada. Coley-Sudlovenick who’s 40 also lives in Canada in Iqaluit in the Nunavut territory.
She’s among the 39,700 individuals who speak Inuktitut and 65 percent of them live in Nunavut. She learned it from her mom who went to a Federal Day School where she went through abuse and wasn’t allowed to speak her native language.
Her daughter says she was mocked, humiliated, and scolded for speaking Inuktitut. If it was like the system wanted it to be, she would’ve probably lost her language entirely.
After this horrible experience, her family promised to maintain their language and culture and also pass it on to the other generations.
Coley-Sudlovenick Keeps the Promise & Launches the Inuktitut Course
Coley-Sudlovenick released the online course in 2021 and she teaches Inuktitut through her business Allurvik. The aim is to maintain Inuit culture through arts, education, and more.
She explains that this is a very rich language that allows Inuit people to have a better grasp of their land, who they are, and how to connect with and treat their community. She notes how many individuals want to learn Inuktitut but don’t have the support or access to a teacher.
She wants to make Inuktitut more accessible, particularly to those Inuits who want to learn it, but also any other person who’s interested. She’s also hopeful that her work will be an inspiration for others to widen the availability of indigenous languages.
She says teaching this dialect to people brings her joy when she hears them speak it. She sees a lot of beauty in connecting with others in the most intimate way: through a shared language.
She didn’t forget to emphasize that her lessons go deeper. Her generation is responsible to pick up the pieces and help the Inuits reclaim their culture, languages, and identity.
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