Month: April 2025

A few miles west of the Parkersville location, we enter Birmingham, Iowa. It was laid out in 1839. Moving on we cross into Jefferson County.

Shortly we pass the former location of the small hamlet of Collette. It was a station on the Peavine Railroad that ran from Fort Madison to nearby Batavia.

Colette was established in 1887. When train service was discontinued in 1939, the city was abandoned.

An unassuming spot southeast of Libertyville, Iowa has historical significance. After the 1832 conflict that has come to be called the Black Hawk War, this area became the boundary between land titled to the U.S. government and the domain of the Sauk and Meskwaki.

Shortly, we enter Libertyville, Iowa.

Libertyville was laid out in 1842.

In the center of town is a historical marker that reads: “Here passed the Dragoon Trails. Blazed in 1835 by the First U.S. Dragoons under Colonel Stephen W. Kearney.”

These soldiers played an important role in opening the Iowa frontier.

Another unassuming area is about a mile west of Libertyville. In 1838, the Sauk and Meskwaki ceded more land to the US government.

Along the portion of Agency Road west of Libertyville were several small towns: Absecum, County Line, and Cotton Grove.

When the stagecoach picked Absecum for a station in 1855, it was given a post office and the one in nearby Cotton Grove was closed.

The village of County Line was located west of Absecum.

When the Rock Island Railroad put a depot there in 1876, the government selected it for a post office and closed the one in Absecum.

That led to Absecum’s downfall. County Line had two houses, a church, an elevator, a depot, and a post office. The village disappeared after the railroad line closed in 1932.

As we cross into Wapello County, we approach the location of the former village of Cotton Grove.

Little is…

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Released: 2025-03-31

The 2021 Census of Population revealed that 243,155 people reported the ability to speak an Indigenous language well enough to conduct a conversation. There were more than 70 distinct Indigenous languages reported on the census questionnaire. Within this rich diversity of Indigenous languages, the data reveal varying levels of vitality and patterns of acquisition and use.

The history of colonial practices in Canada has had a profoundly negative impact on the use of Indigenous languages. Perhaps most notably, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report detailed many of the harms done to the languages of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children through the residential school system, in an effort to assimilate Indigenous people and break their ties to their culture.

In response to the Calls to Action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Indigenous Languages Act was passed in 2019. With its passage, the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages was created to “help promote Indigenous languages and support the efforts of Indigenous peoples to reclaim, revitalize, maintain and strengthen their languages.”

Today, the Centre for Indigenous Statistics and Partnerships at Statistics Canada, in collaboration with the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages, is releasing nine new reports on Indigenous languages in Canada, providing relevant data on the vitality and patterns of language acquisition and use. Among these reports, eight are framed around one of the major Indigenous language families in Canada—Algonquian, Athabaskan, Inuktut (Inuit), Iroquoian, Salish, Siouan, Tsimshian and Wakashan—and one report focuses on languages that are not part of any specific family (Haida, Ktunaxa [Kutenai] and Michif).

Algonquian, Inuktut (Inuit) and Athabaskan language families are those spoken most often

Indigenous languages are generally classified into one of eight major language families, such as Athabaskan languages or Inuktut (Inuit) languages. In terms of language knowledge, the largest Indigenous language family in 2021 was Algonquian languages, with 163,815 speakers. The…

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