APTN’s new channel wants to boost access to 18 Indigenous languages | Canada Voices

During the 2021 federal leaders’ debates at the Canadian Museum of History, the team at Aboriginal Peoples Television Network began to wonder if the way they broadcast translations in six different Indigenous languages, including Plains Cree, Innu and Anishinaabemowin, made sense.

APTN operated four channels, three of which were regional, which began to prompt some hard questions, says Mike Omelus, the broadcaster’s executive director of content and strategy. Should the Innu translation be broadcast on APTN’s North regional channel, or the East? Would Indigenous viewers who’d moved from one broadcast area, such as from Canada’s far north to its south, get the translation they needed?

“We got the sense that we weren’t doing as much as we possibly could to serve viewers,” Omelus says. He and his colleagues started to study new options, soon filing for a licence amendment from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC granted APTN’s wish in May: it would reduce the broadcaster’s channels from four to two, with one channel dedicated to Indigenous-language programming.

The APTN Languages channel launched earlier this month, promising a minimum of 100 hours of Indigenous-language programming each week across 18 languages. It’s building on what broadcasters such as Earl Wood of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, the host of Hockey Night in Canada in Cree, say is vital.

“There are so many different Indigenous languages in Canada, and that is the very fabric of identity,” says Wood, who hosts his broadcasts in Plains Cree. “With that comes a world view that helps us retain the authenticity of our intentions – with our relationship with our land and everything on it, with the Indigenous worldview.”

Under APTN’s old four-channel model, Omelus says, the volume of Indigenous-language content was “limited,” in part because of the number of programs the broadcaster also needed to provide in French and English. With its new model, staff and producers hope to boost the public’s access to Indigenous languages – which the Assembly of First Nations warns are deeply endangered due to Canada’s long history of assimilationist policies and actions – and to maybe even build an industry around them.

“Our hope and dream for the long term is to have APTN help create an Indigenous production ecosystem in Indigenous languages, just like APTN was largely responsible for the Indigenous production ecosystem that exists now in English and French,” Omelus says. (The other national APTN-branded channel will still primarily broadcast in French and English.)

The new channel’s launch coincides with APTN’s 25th anniversary. Since its creation in 1999, it’s aired programs in 54 Indigenous languages. APTN Languages will focus on only a third of those to start, in part because of just how endangered some languages are.

Some of these languages have hardly ever been filmed. Omelus points to Michael Bourquin’s documentary Dah-tsiye Kehke: Our Grandfather’s Footprints, the debut of which last decade is understood to have been the first-ever broadcast of the Tahltan language, of which only a few dozen speakers are believed to remain.

But Omelus says the broadcaster has more than 1,300 hours in its 18 planned languages – and is actively both reacquiring older shows and commission new content “in as many languages as possible.”

When the longtime educator and Taqqut Productions co-founder Louise Flaherty’s granddaughter was born, she grew concerned about the lack of children’s programming in Inuktitut. So the Inuk producer began developing Anaana’s Tent, a pre-school show hosted by Rita Claire Mike-Murphy featuring both puppets and animation. APTN began broadcasting it in Inuktitut and English in 2018.

The third season launched this month in Inuktitut on APTN Languages, and now Flaherty is close to launching another Inuktitut preschool show on the channel, Tundra Friends, hosted by Susan Aglukark. Not only has APTN been strong supporters, but the new channel is “essential,” Flaherty says: “Not everybody gets to hear their languages anymore.”

Wood, whose Hockey Night in Canada in Cree broadcasts are planned to appear on APTN Languages this season pending a sub-licensing deal with Rogers, said that he’s already heard more Plains Cree phrases spoken by young people since a version of the show debuted in 2019. “It’s an amazing start to something bigger,” he says. “I believe now we are at the cusp of greater more powerful measures of retaining our language, and ensuring that it’s there for generations to come.”