This chapter addresses the current political climate in Canada with respect to language politics through an examination of historical settler-colonial and Indigenous relations. The focus is the interplay, and the inherent contradictions, between the state and Indigenous language interests. This includes a consideration of language and education rights, policies, and moves to reconciliation on behalf of state and Indigenous actors. The diverse goals and outcomes of Indigenous educational policies and practices will be examined with a focus on the Canadian Arctic, the role of Indigenous land-based pedagogies, and the necessary conceptualization and reaffirmation of languages as unbounded, action-oriented practices that resist objectification and enumeration.

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.