Daghida: Cold Lake First Nation Works Towards

• Main Authors: Dene Language Revitalization, Heather Blair, Sally Rice, Valerie Wood, John Janvier
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dene Suline; First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.411.7821; http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/ILAC/ILAC_10.pdf

about the risk of losing their language. In this paper, we will outline the context of language loss on the Cold Lake First Nations (CLFN) reserve as well as describe the collaborative research project between the academic community and that of Cold Lake First Nations and the efforts supported by this project to revitalize the Dene Suline language. The Cold Lake First Nations Dene Suline 1 live near Cold Lake, Alberta, approximately 300 kilometres northeast of Edmonton on the Alberta and Saskatchewan border. They originally lived in family groups on lands encompassing roughly 150,000 square kilometres, although the reserve lands that they now inhabit represent less than one percent of their traditional territory. They were a nomadic people who maintained both summer and winter camps, travelling between them by foot or dog team. After the signing of Treaty Six in 1876, many families worked on their reserve farms in summer raising cattle and horses. In winter, they continued to travel north to hunt, trap, and fish. In the early 1950s, the federal government turned the traditional Dene Suline