Here is what we celebrate on Canada Day: On June 30 1867, midnight struck and church bells in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick rang; Manitoba was added three years later. And, here are just a few founding facts we tend to skip over: Canadian explorers found the land to have great potential for farming, so out went the original tenants, the Metis, and in came our nation. What is now Canada’s Maritimes was previously occupied by Mi’kmaq. Lieutenant General Edward Cornwallis founded Halifax, and put a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq’s people, children included. Until two years ago, a Halifax school was named after him.

Canadians with privilege don’t like to think about aboriginal issues. The refrain usually goes something like this: it isn’t our fault about what happened back then. However, it is our responsibility to acknowledge what happened instead of continuing to ignore the  challenges aboriginal communities still face because of the devastation they were forced to endure, all in the name of Canada’s quest to become a great nation. We need especially care because our federal government keeps locking this issue away—inside of residential schools and the prison system (apparently, it is no longer civilized to murder, rape, and scalp).

The people of Attawapiskat still need homes and the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation’s right to go on their own land is being revoked. Instead of acknowledging these human rights issues, the federal government discredits them in the public’s eye. And the mainstream media stops paying attention when the issue is no longer hot, when Idle No More isn’t hip any longer.

National Aboriginal History Month (started in 1999) goes unnoticed the same way as Celery Month. June 21 is National Aboriginal Day. Though it started in 1996, I’ve rarely heard of celebrations for it—at least ones that are as widespread and on the same scale as Canada Day. According to the Canadian Charity, Evergreen, “1.3 million people self-identify as having First Nations, Metis or Inuit heritage or, Aboriginal ancestry.” That is a big demographic to simply ignore, on Canada Day, or any other.

Read: White people, here’s your one-time Canada Day special: Native people apologize back!

Example of written Mi'kmaq

It will also be York’s first dissertation written in an aboriginal language. Until last fall, the school had only allowed PhD works in English and French. But after seeing what Metallic had done for his comprehensives, it agreed to allow him and any other student to present a thesis or dissertation in an aboriginal language, without translation, provided they have committee support.

It’s a decision that Anders Sandberg, associate dean of the faculty of environmental studies at York and one of Metallic’s advisors, hopes will “accommodate aspirations of the First Nations community.” He explains that the university agreed not to require an English version because, in Metallic’s case, his work directly relates to the Mi’kmaq community and an English translation would not assert the value of the language, and it could not convey the same meaning.

So far, one other student has decided to follow in Metallic’s footsteps. Diane Mitchell, who will be presenting her master’s thesis in Mi’kmaq, says that to study her language and culture through the filter of another would not be “aiding and abetting” her language. “To go to a university and study my language or my culture and do it in another language would be pointless.”

However, not everyone is impressed by York’s new initiative. “There’s nothing wrong with composing something in one of the languages,” says John Steckley, the sole speaker of Huron and a professor at Humber College, but “how do you then extend it to a wider audience, even a wider Mi’kmaq audience, because the vast majority of people don’t speak the language?” With what he estimates to be only 20,000 to 40,000 Canadians able to speak an aboriginal language, Steckley sees the need for a “middle document” that at least gives a sense of what’s being communicated and how difficult translation is.

Still, with these languages rapidly on the decline, York’s acknowledgement of aboriginal languages may encourage other educational institutions to do the same.

After all, points out Mitchell, “I do feel that a lot of aboriginal everything has been treated more as a curio than as something real, and to me this is how you make something real. You incorporate it into things that are valued.”