Language, Integration, and White Settler National Belonging in Canada

• In Event: Unsettling Educations: Language, Race, and Learning in White Settler Colonial Societies

Abstract

The white settler projects of assimilation that specifically targeted Indigenous communities and immigrant groups have been largely discounted in the present day. These projects included state funded residential schools systems that removed over 150,000 Indigenous children from their homes in order to eradicate Indigenous culture, language and lifeways, as well as explicitly exclusionary immigration policies that marginalized and limited existing racialized groups both in the US and Canada. In the present, the rejection of overt ‘assimilation’ policies has instead led to a framework of ‘integration’ for the recognition of Indigenous and racialized groups within the white settler context; whether it is couched in the language of multiculturalism, inclusion or preservation.

In this paper, I want to explore how the emergence of integration as the contemporary preferred mode for organizing national belonging, particularly in the purportedly national multicultural context of Canada, does not necessarily emerge in opposition to assimilation but rather is part of the same continuum for the constitution and management of difference. However, with the contemporary rejection of overt racial and colonial articulations of Otherness (Bonilla-Silva, 2010), language and culture have become the new acceptable terrain for the identification of difference (Haque, 2012). In this way, language, in particular, has become a key technology in the naming and dividing practices of differences that are constitutive to contemporary national projects of integration.

In order to explore this question, I examine the promotion of official language proficiency as the technology of integration for immigrant newcomers to Canada and as and the means to resolving the tension between the ideals of multiculturalism meant to promote heterogeneity and concerns about social cohesion through adherence to a core set of ‘Canadian’ values (Jedwab, 2012). Alan Patten and Will Kymlicka (both 2003) see a common language as the resolution of the tension between principles of multiculturalism and the achievement of a cohesive democratic society; that is, the evolution of a more complex form of citizenship that recognizes diversity within today’s nation state. This focus on language as the ideal technology of integration is predicated on the purported openness of language; that is the idea that that anyone can learn a language. The openness of language as an essential human capacity not only individualizes language loss but also discounts the material and social effort that goes into language acquisition. The professed openness of language also serves to foreclose the visibly embodied racialization of linguistic practice that is not ‘official’ or ‘fluent’ and marked as ‘accented’ or different (Haque, 2014); specifically, those linguistic practices in need of amelioration through the promise of the government’s immigrant language training programs.

Thus, using qualitative content analysis, this project will draw on a range of documentary sources - including government documents (reports, policies, support materials); community produced reports, materials and resources, as well as media coverage of related events and stories – in order to examine integration as a mode for organizing differentiated contemporary belonging through the technology of language for Indigenous and ‘immigrant’ groups within the white settler context of Canada.

Author

• Eve Haque, York University