Victor Guerin committed to revitalizing the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language and pressing for Indigenous rights

By Geoff Gilliard

Victor Guerin, a master’s student in Linguistics of a First Nations Language, has been awarded the 2020-21 Indigenous Graduate Entrance Scholarship (IGES). He is committed to revitalizing hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the downriver dialect of the Halkomelem language spoken by the Musqueam people. There are fewer than 200 speakers of the Halkomelem language and only four proficient speakers of the Musqueam’s hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ dialect.

“I've been involved in revitalization of my language for some 30-plus years and my family's been politically involved for generations,” says Guerin. “My grandma was a political activist pressing for Indigenous rights.”

Guerin, who will enter the Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies PhD program in the fall 2020 semester, is documenting the knowledge passed on to him by Musqueam elders over the decades. Compiling source information in one place will arm the First Nation’s leadership with a foundation for pressing forward in its battle to re-establish Indigenous rights and title.

Guerin's path to learning linguistics at SFU began as a child when his mother, as band administrator, hired his late grand-uncle Arnold Guerin to run a language-instruction program at Musqueam. Arnold also taught Guerin about Musqueam performance, and encouraged him to give speeches.

Eventually, Guerin began presenting territorial welcomes for political groups, business and academic gatherings, and at environmental rallies.

“Then the idea came to me that I should look into the genesis of these territorial welcomes,” he says. “And what they come from is our pre-contact practice. Each community used paddle songs to identify themselves when they were approaching another village. That's the way they identified themselves as friends, rather than foes. And then the welcome song, of course, was used to welcome them.”

But Guerin felt there was a missing component in the territorial welcome as it’s practiced today.

“We can take, for instance, the examples of Captain Vancouver and Simon Fraser in Musqueam territory. When Captain Vancouver arrived, everybody was congenial and our people went aboard his ships and traded with him. Conversely, when Simon Fraser came down the river named after him, he had stolen a canoe from one of our friends’ villages upriver and they'd gotten word down to Musqueam before he arrived that this had happened. When he arrived at Musqueam he was greeted by a flotilla of canoes, informed he was no longer welcome in this territory, and that he was to go back. So that's the component that’s missing from the territorial welcome as it's done today: the fact that our people in that time had authority to say, ‘no, you're not welcome to come ashore’. The basis of my PhD thesis is looking into the territorial welcomes and the legal authority that Indigenous people had in pre-contact time.”

The IGES is awarded to students who have demonstrated academic excellence and outstanding achievement in their studies, with emphasis on intellectual ability, originality and ability in research.

Photo sourced from https://youtu.be/4QViR-E_wQI © City of Vancouver.