Mark Turin

Many newcomers to Canada experience significant difficulties as they adjust to life in their new community, with few being more challenging than their journey to become English speakers. While Canada’s espousal of a welcoming, multicultural national identity, as well as its federally funded Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, suggest cohesive social integration, the historical consequences of the discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism and language ideologies of monolingualism and standardization that inform the LINC program have only served to assimilate and marginalize newcomers. The disruptions that COVID-19 brought to LINC classes only further complicated and exacerbated many of the issues that newcomers were already facing. However, despite these challenges, the incorporation of digital technologies into the LINC class as a way to adjust to the reality of the pandemic has created a new space outside of the class, yet still within the LINC community, through which a transformative, translingual pedagogy has the potential to take root. With appropriate guidance, the adoption of a translingual pedagogy has the potential to both work against the problematic discourses perpetuating within Canada, as well as improve the students’ English language learning outcomes by providing increased opportunities for digital literacy socialization.

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In this thesis, I investigate the silenced histories of Indigenous peoples who have been written out of collective memory, official documents and, in some cases, their own family histories. I show how the actions of colonists can be explained through a colonial-Marxist lens of historical materialism and how this methodologically creates space for colonialism which, consequently, strategically silences and erases Indigenous lives. I focus my research on a family who has searched for answers for over sixty years, the Beier family, to aid them in the search for the life story of George Ralph McKenzie, an Indigenous man who served in the Canadian military and who was erased from his family’s history. I gathered data, including but not limited to, birth and death certificates, photographs and documents to compile a probable or possible record of McKenzie’s existence. I exhausted available archival, historical, religious, genealogical, public, private, professional and governmental databases and resources. Knowledge and interactions of Indigenous presences in areas coveted by European governments, during first-contact, provoked a need to design strategies to be used during interactions with Indigenous peoples. The Church has also been an integral part of many European governments and the alterations of interpretations and editing of religious texts have been used as a tool for maintaining public control for millenniums. Silencing Indigenous peoples through education was a deliberate and methodical form of colonization used to dominate Indigenous societies. During the wars in which Canada participated Indigenous peoples were, often, not accurately recorded. This is due to a systemic and structural type of diversion and Indigenous peoples were still considered to be dispensable at the time. Erasure cultivates within families, due to systemic and systematic racism and oppression of cultures and heritages. In 2017, Canada is oppressing and silencing Indigenous voices. Canada is using terms such as multiculturalism and diversity to boast about its acceptance and compassion for others while ignoring the needs of Indigenous peoples. Reconciliation will involve the decolonization or dismantling of an entire system of colonialism that is entrenched in the relationships, personal lives, politics, laws, and governments in Canada.

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