2022 Award for Excellence in Leadership: Donna Gerdts and Marianne Ignace

In an undertaking that started with courses and programs offered to undergraduates in Indigenous communities in 1992, Drs. Donna Gerdts and Marianne Ignace, have successfully built up a Master of Arts program to support Indigenous Languages in the Department of Linguistics.

Department of Linguistics chair, Panayiotis Pappas says, “the creation of this graduate-level program is the result of many decades of work teaching, researching and providing service to the University and to Indigenous communities. Both Donna and Marianne have worked tirelessly over the past three decades to support Indigenous communities in the documentation, maintenance and revitalization of their languages and cultures.”

More importantly, the programming set up by Ignace and Gerdts is key decolonization and reconciliation efforts, not only within Linguistics, but in the larger communities benefitting from their students taking these courses.

The MA program was developed through intense collaboration with Indigenous communities, building community capacity for Indigenous peoples to take on leadership roles in language revitalization.

Pappas shares, “Marianne and Donna had to fill many different and challenging roles: They had to advocate for language maintenance and revitalization efforts, they had to mediate between the University and several different Indigenous communities, they had to prepare new course materials, teach and mentor other teachers, deal with numerous bureaucratic incongruencies and provide logistical and emotional support to their students. Their efforts have been, without a hint of hyperbole, superhuman.”

Gerdts and Ignace would like to acknowledge and thank Nancy Hedberg for all of the support and work that she undertook to help bring about the Graduate Certificate and MA programs.

This program supports Indigenous graduate students and their communities throughout British Columbia and the Yukon in promoting sustainable language maintenance and revitalization efforts, training Indigenous students on how to lead these efforts from Indigenous-led positions of knowledge, experience and leadership for future generations to come.

We thank Drs. Ignace and Gerdts for their support of Indigenous graduate students in undertaking vital efforts towards ensuring future generations of Indigenous children are able to connect with their pasts and futures through their traditional languages.

The 2024 Dean of Graduate Studies Awards for Excellence are open for nominations. Deadline for nominations is May 17, 2024.