According to (McIvor and Anisman, 2018), across Canada, the United States, and around the

world, many Indigenous communities, organizations, and individuals are working hard to keep
their languages alive and bring them back into everyday use. These strategies range from early
childhood and school-based immersion programs, language classes for different ages, curriculum
and recording projects with proficient speakers, to planning activities, among others. The
majority of language work is territory-based, done face-to-face, and therefore had to stop
immediately for the safety of speakers, learners, and communities as a whole.
Moreover, the pandemic crisis that hit in the first part of 2020 had the potential to silence and
deprioritize language work, reducing it back to a non-judgmental activity. Indigenous Language
Revitalization (ILR) work often fights for a place on the “societal agenda” and sometimes even
within communities themselves, to be seen as a priority. The current societal agenda in Canada
and the United States, in particular, addresses complex new health disparities further illuminated
by COVID-19, in addition to the realities of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, calls for
defunding police, toppling colonizers of statues, ongoing anti-pipeline protests and calls to
dismantle racialized sports team mascots.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1177180120970930

In addition, according to Perso and Hayward (2020) described student assessment as “an ongoing
process of gathering evidence to determine what students know, understand, and can do” (p.
167). The assessment determines grades, class choices, pedagogy, curriculum, sometimes school
location, graduation, and college/university eligibility. Additionally, assessment practices and
outcomes can create dominant beliefs about a person's ability to learn and succeed, academically,
physically, emotionally, and socially, in school and in life more generally. . However, not all
forms of assessment are effective. Trumbull and Nelson-Barber (2019) explained that for both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, many common assessment practices are ineffective and
sometimes even harmful.
In Canada, Indigenous peoples include three groups: First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. “The term
Indigenous refers to all of these groups, collectively or separately” (Queen's University, 2019, p.
2). First Nations peoples refer to members of legally recognized bands or reserve-based
communities in Canada (Peters and Mika, 2017). “Métis refers to the distinct society that
emerged from the union of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures during the period of
European expansion into Western Canada” (Lakehead University, 2020, para 3). Inuit refers to
the cultural and linguistic identity (i.e. Inuktitut) of indigenous peoples whose traditional lands
are located in the Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland (Lakehead University, 2020).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.679972/full