The Vancouver Women’s March had Indigenous speakers from a variety of nations, but according to UBC graduate David Danos, deaf people might not have gotten the full picture.
“When they were talking ... the interpreter who was interpreting into ASL (American Sign Language), was just saying, ‘First Nations language.’ Not ideal, because that's very inaccessible for deaf, but it’s understandable. It was just very colonial and very bad,” said Danos.
Normally, when an ASL speaker doesn’t know the sign for a word, they fingerspell, which is when the speaker spells out the word using one sign for each letter of the alphabet. But Danos ran into trouble when he would try to sign Indigenous words to his deaf friends.
“It’s just physically impossible,” he said.
So, for the past few months, Danos has worked out signs for nearly every letter in Canadian First Nations languages, with the help of a couple friends and profs along the way — as well as his boyfriend, who patiently took dozens of photos of Danos’s hands for the website.
“Of our 64, 65, 66 Indigenous languages in Canada, I captured about 60 of them,” he said. As for the others, “That is a job for me or somebody else in the future.”
Here it is in action:
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So why hasn’t such an important project been undertaken yet? Firstly, Danos said, “the overlap between deaf and Indigenous communities is really small.”
It also has to do, Danos says, with the ongoing linguicide of deaf languages. The Canadian Association of the Deaf notes that illiteracy is a major issue in deaf communities, one which they attribute to an “impaired communication environment,” a lack of education and a lack of deaf educators.
Danos goes out of his way to note his privilege and lack of deaf/indigenous culture on his site. The first part of his “about me” section is a land acknowledgment, followed by: “I am hearing and white.”
“It’s a huge deal to me that I’m in my own lane. I would have loved a deafie to be able to have done this, rather than myself, because I’m hearing — my background is not deaf. It’s not my culture. But at the same time, nobody’s doing it, and reconciliation needs to happen,” he said.
“This is a tool that people can use. I don’t want to push this on anyone. It’s not my place to be policing deaf communities, so it’s just there.”
The First Nations Longhouse at UBC did not respond to a request for comment. This article will be updated if and when they do.
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