When Benjamin Young was asked to consult on a film to be made entirely in his ancestral Haida tongue, he thought the project sounded almost impossibly ambitious. As head teacher and director of Haida Immersion Preschool in Hydaburg in the US state of Alaska, he knew the number of fluent Haida speakers could be counted on just two sets of hands. “It was too crazy to be true,” says Young, whose indigenous people live mostly in Haida Gwaii, the tree-laden archipelago off British Columbia, Canada, that they have occupied for millennia. “Make a full, feature-length film only in our language? I knew the complexity of the work it would take to pull something like this off,” he says. SGaawaay K’uuna , a largely indigenous effort inspired by the classic Haida tale of the wild man Gaagiixid, would ultimately be honoured by the Vancouver International Film Festival and Vancouver Film Critics Circle as the best Canadian film of 2018. The movie, whose title means “Edge of the Knife”, also earned the critics’ nods for best director, best actor and best supporting actor in a Canadian film. She’s 103 and speaks Patua, the dying language of Macau Filmmakers are increasingly focusing on indigenous languages in their work, with efforts such as last year’s Soojii (“Creatures”), made entirely in the Blackfoot Native American language of northern Montana, and Guatemala’s Ixcanul (“Volcano”, 2015), whose dialogue is conducted in Kaqchikel, one of the country’s 22 existing Mayan languages. The growing success of such efforts, some say, not only presents opportunities to tell untold stories more authentically but is fuelling additional indigenous-led projects by filmmakers and communities with hopes of inspiring younger generations to hold on to dwindling ancestral tongues . “There’s been just a phenomenal resurgence of indigenous pride in the last 20 years,” says Leonie Sandercock, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who co-wrote the script for SGaawaay K’uuna . “With that comes a real desire to not just reclaim language, but to bring it back before it’s gone.” Indigenous people make up less than six per cent of the global population, according to a United Nations report, but speak more than 4,000 of the world’s around 6,700 languages. Many languages, however, are imperilled: Unesco, the UN’s world peace and security agency, predicts 3,000 of them, mostly indigenous, could vanish by the century’s end. In response, the UN in January 2020 declared the years 2022 to 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to draw attention to the crisis and galvanise efforts to prevent extinction. The seeds of SGaawaay K’uuna were planted after Sandercock learned through her indigenous community planning work on Canada’s Haida Gwaii that language preservation was among the community’s priorities. Nearly all abled Haida speakers were older than 70. “There was a real concern that, when those folks died, then the language would die,” she says. Languages in danger: seven having a revival like Hebrew, including Quechua When the Haida chief floated the idea of making a Haida-language feature film, Sandercock, who had a screenwriting degree, embraced the possibility. Tribal elders mulled it over, having often fretted that younger members were not drawn to traditional classroom language instruction. “We argued that a film in the Haida language could be a really cool way for youth to get into language, and that the goal would be to employ as many local people as we could,” Sandercock recalls. Fewer than 20 of around 5,000 Haida people are fluent in their mother tongue – a legacy of indigenous boarding-school punishments designed to replace the language with English and of parents urged by school officials to do the same so their children could become prosperous members of society. “It wasn’t something where the elders said, ‘This language is obsolete,’” says Young, the preschool director. “It was taken from them – from my parents’ generation. I have to recognise that [my parents] only wanted the best for us.” As a linguistics student at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Young noted his desire to learn his ancestral language to his instructor, who urged him to go where the language was – back to his native Hydaburg, a tiny southeast Alaskan city on Prince of Wales Island, just north of Haida Gwaii. What started as a plan to spend a semester being mentored by his 95-year-old grandfather turned into five years spent learning conversational Haida, until his grandfather died at age 100. At 35, Young is now widely considered the youngest proficient speaker of Haida. Every language has its own richness and lens, and there are concepts that can only be expressed in your language Amalia Cordova, co-director of Mother Tongue Film Festival Despite his doubts, he was thrilled to work on the Haida movie project, for which Sandercock had got the green light. Another director spotlighting indigenous tongues is Guatemala’s Jayro Bustamante, whose 2015 drama Ixcanul and 2019 horror/mystery La Llorona both feature Kaqchikel, one of the country’s 22 existing Mayan languages. Ixcanul , made entirely in Kaqchikel, depicts life that usually goes unseen – the harsh existence of coffee workers labouring in snake-infested lands near a Guatemalan volcano. For Bustamante, centring the indigenous language was paramount as an homage to his late Kaqchikel grandmother. When he was young, she taught him bits of her mother tongue and at one point told him that “she didn’t use that language in public”, he says. “At that moment, I understood that being associated with indigenous people was seen as a shame.” Bustamante credits the exchange with awakening his social consciousness, which prompted a desire to accurately reflect the realities of indigenous life in Guatemala – the discrimination and language barriers that limit access to proper medical care or legal rights, circumstances both reflected in Ixcanul . Through the foundation Bustamante created, also called Ixcanul, he brings film to indigenous communities, showing his works as well as those of other directors that tap into local social issues or problems as a means of unleashing pent-up frustrations in the discussions that follow. Eyes on the prize – novel tactic to save a dying language “Sometimes being discriminated is so difficult because there is that shame behind it,” he says. “You won’t admit you’re discriminated even if you are. It’s easier to use the movie and say, ‘Maria is being discriminated.’ That’s one of my preferred programmes in the foundation because you can really feel how proud people are to be represented.” In the 2021 film Sooyii , a young Blackfoot warrior wrestles with the destruction of his community as smallpox, introduced to the area by Europeans, spreads through his native villages in the late 1700s. “Father,” he asks in his mother tongue, “why am I not cursed? Why am I still alive?” The movie, with an entirely Blackfoot cast and script, was shot on tribal land in Montana and directed by Hungarian-born Krisztian Kery. The language, spoken by fewer than 5,000 of about 50,000 Blackfoot people, is considered endangered by Unesco. While film itself can’t revive a language, says Joshua Bell, founder of the Mother Tongue Film Festival in Washington, it can become a tool for teaching beyond the classroom. “It creates another conduit for people to hear the power of voices,” says Bell, also the curator of globalisation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “And hopefully it inspires them to pursue it.” In addition to films made in mother tongues, major English-language films have also seen first-time translations into indigenous languages of late, such as Disney’s 2016 hit Moana , which was translated into Maori, Tahitian and Hawaiian. And Star Wars: A New Hope was translated into Dine’ Bazaad, language of the Navajo community of America’s southwest, in 2013. The effort proved so successful among the Navajo that it was repeated with Disney’s Finding Nemo and the classic spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars . “Every language has its own richness and lens,” says Amalia Cordova, co-director of Mother Tongue Film Festival, “and there are concepts that can only be expressed in your language.” She and Bell credit the rise of online streaming, as well as a desire to engage younger generations where they are, with helping to fuel the boom of indigenous language films. Additionally, a climate of rising social awareness and cultural empowerment has liberated people to express themselves more freely, they say. By empowering people to produce cinema for themselves in their own languages, “you’re flipping this idea of audience, tapping the fountains of a community’s knowledge”, Cordova says. For indigenous people whose exposure has been limited, inaccurate or narrowly presented by non-natives, Cordova says, “it’s claiming the right to be alive. Language is the ultimate proof of your presence”.