For the past twenty years or so, Indigenous realities have been attracting more and more university
research and eliciting growing interest from the general public. A number of government initiatives
have been set up to foster reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and to repair the harm caused by
colonization. These initiatives include the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (the TRC,
2007–2015) and the Public Inquiry Commission on Relations Between Indigenous Peoples and Certain
Public Services in Quebec: Listening, Reconciliation and Progress (the Viens Commission, 2016–
2019). Reconciliation and repair call for the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages.
To draw attention to this need, the United Nations declared the period from 2022 to 2032 to be the
“International Decade of Indigenous Languages.” In Canada, sixty Indigenous languages belonging to
twelve language families were still spoken in 2011. However, over the years, there has been a decline in
the number of Indigenous people (1) who are able to carry on a conversation in an Indigenous language,
and (2) who learn an Indigenous language as their first language in childhood.

The literary translation and book publishing sectors could, in principle, play an important role in the
promotion, preservation, and even revitalization of Indigenous languages in Quebec and the rest of
Canada. This report considers the potential contribution of these sectors.