The Indigenous languages of North America once constituted the entire human linguistic landscape of the continent, and played a vital role in the early relationships between Indigenous peoples and European explorers and traders. In the modern national era, however, those languages have been relegated to a footnote, and the few efforts to include them in legislation and policy have done little to change their marginal status. In this chapter I examine the increasing prominence of linguistic issues in Indigenous political and cultural movements in North America, together with relevant aspirational declarations and policy statements. From this foundation, I argue that reconciliation, as a political and social process aimed at achieving greater parity and justice between Indigenous and settler peoples in North America, offers more promising grounds, ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically, for the management of language diversity in general, and suggest some specific policy directions for more detailed exploration.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.