Case Study | SENĆOŦEN LE,NOṈET SCUL,ÁUTW – SENĆOŦEN Survival School

Overview

The WSÁNEĆ people and their language, SENĆOŦEN, have deep ties to their Homeland. As such, when the WSÁNEĆ School Board (WSB) was thinking through what it needed to do to launch a language immersion program, it quickly realized that the program would need to be land-based. It took advice from Elders like SWETÁLIYE Marie Cooper, who said during the emerging planning process in 2005 that, “unless our young ones begin to find their place, to see, hear, feel and experience our territory, to learn who we are as Saanich people, then we risk losing that knowledge.”

Language planners took SWETÁLIYE’s advice to heart and have stewarded the SENĆOŦEN LE,NOṈET SCUL, ÁUTW SENĆOŦEN Survival Immersion School (SNSA) to grow the Nation’s adult educators’ and young students’ skills and knowledge.

Taking a lesson from purple camas, a culturally important plant iconic to the Garry oak meadows of Vancouver Island and the southern Gulf Islands, the WSB has slowly grown its program. Camas, a traditional food staple, can take up to six years to grow from seed to bloom. Likewise, SNSA did not launch on day one in 2006; rather, the WSB looked to other Indigenous language immersion programs, like those in Hawai’i, and then endeavoured to develop a curriculum based entirely on what WSÁNEĆ people deemed to be most important to them: how can we learn from our Homeland? Then, they nurtured apprentice teachers, pairing them with Elders to internalize the importance of the words and concepts they were learning through the SȾÁ,SEN TŦE SENĆOŦEN language revitalization program. In 2012, six years on from when the program’s roots were formed, the WSB’s curriculum and materials were ready and tailor-made, and its educators were prepared. Then, the SNSA began to bloom.

Engagement and Solutions

“Our goal is to stay in immersion at all times while engaging in our natural surroundings,” the school board said of SNSA in 2012. The reason was simple.

“Our connections to our land are not just physical,” explained SWETÁLIYE in 2005. “It is all encompassing. Our language, place names, our heart, our soul, our spirit, our livelihood, our way of living and being is tied up in our land.” To strengthen the oral tradition and identity of students and educators alike, the WSB had to take its students outside.

Today, the WSB runs immersion programming for preschoolers through grade 11, having grown the program along with its teachers and learners every year. No English is spoken in class before grade 4, and for one-third of the school day, primary students spend their time outside, learning the names of the beings in their natural world and deepening their relationships with them.

Elders and guests guide this learning, asking students questions to develop critical thinking skills, from what a given place name means to “How did the ancestors live sustainably with this place?” and “How can we live sustainably in this place again?”

The WSB has also brought parents along on the journey, offering night classes, online lessons and take-home kits to help them support their children’s language learning in a long-term effort to bring SENĆOŦEN into W̱SÁNEĆ homes.

Outcomes and Future Vision

When it started planning the program, the WSB set a goal to grow an immersion curriculum through to grade 12. Along the way, it also had to empower its educators.

There were only three language educators when the language nest (preschool) launched—not enough to eventually teach a full pre-K to grade 12 roster. So the WSB began by fostering apprenticeships, paying people to spend time learning from Elders in exchange for a guarantee that they would enroll in an education or early childhood education degree so that they could eventually pass their new knowledge on. Along with this, the nearby University of Victoria launched a Bachelor of Education program for SENĆOŦEN in 2010 and a master’s in language revitalization two years later. The number of SENĆOŦEN educators has grown from three in 2005 to more than 20 in 2025.

When the WSB launched its apprenticeship program, SȾÁ,SEN TŦE SENĆOŦEN, in 2009, it chose a name that would inspire hope. SȾÁ,SEN is the cedar plank traditionally placed at the entry way of a chief’s house, where children would use it like a trampoline. The sound of their jumps made it known that the village was safe and at peace. As a metaphor, SȾÁ,SEN serves as a springboard for the future. “If the children can be heard using the language, we know we are safe,” says the WSB.