Deborah (Dee) Doss-Cody learned her language the way many of her generation did: in fragments, overheard from the spaces where adults thought children weren’t listening.
The UBC Okanagan alumna is a third-generation residential school attendee, like her parents and grandparents before her. She heard her language, St’át’imcets, at home near Lillooet, BC, but English still dominated.
Something an elder once said stayed with her, though she didn’t grasp its full weight at the time: “If you don’t speak your language and if you don’t understand your language, then are you even St’át’imc? If you don’t speak the language, will your ancestors recognize you?”
The words frustrated Doss-Cody at first. Then, they became motivating.
In spring 2026, Doss-Cody crossed the stage at UBC Okanagan as one of four graduates in the inaugural cohort of the Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency—a degree in the very language that, a generation ago, residential schools were built to erase.
It was during her time at UBCO that another elder offered her class another perspective: St’át’imcets is embedded in their DNA, and they only need to remember it.
St’át’imcets is a Northern Interior Salish language spoken in the territories around the middle Fraser and Lillooet rivers. Fewer than 50 fluent speakers remain in the northern St’át’imc area, nearly all of them elderly. It is, by every measure, a language in danger of disappearing.
Rena Patrick, Dee Doss-Cody and Audrey Casper pose for photos during a convocation celebration at UBC Okanagan in June 2026.
For Rena Patrick, of N’Quatqua, the language was spoken low, over tea, when something important was happening that the children weren’t meant to follow.
“My mom was fluent, but she went to residential school,” Patrick says. “She said, ‘No (you shouldn’t learn it), because you’ll just get hurt. You’ll just get laughed at,’ so they refused to teach us.”
Her father came back to it near the end of his life, offering words to help his daughter as she began her own studies.
“It made him feel good,” she says. “It brought him back to where he was.”
Patrick is an early childhood educator now, working with children from infancy to age 12 at her community’s daycare. She uses the language with them daily. Her favourite phrase to ask them is: Did you sleep well?
In her own home, she speaks it as loudly as she can with her granddaughter.
If Patrick inherited a hidden language, Angelina Hopkins-Rose inherited its absence. She grew up in Vancouver with scarce exposure to St’át’imcets. Her grandmother’s parents had been first-language speakers, both sent to residential school.
They came out and decided their children wouldn’t learn the language. It was a decision made, Hopkins-Rose understands, to protect them.
“You can lose a language in one generation,” she says. “That’s what happened in my family. And it takes three generations to gain it back.”
She is unsparing about how that loss happened.
“It was very deliberate,” she says of the residential school system. “Our language contains who we are as a people. It connects us to the land. To disconnect us from the language was to disconnect us from who we are, so that we could be dispossessed of our land. It always comes down to land.”
Angelina Hopkins-Rose was one of four graduates from the inaugural cohort of the Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency at UBC Okanagan.
The language, she says, redrew the course of her life. She now speaks it at home with her two young children, works as a research assistant on language resources, and has started an Indigenous language master’s degree at University of Victoria.
“The trajectory of my life completely shifted,” she says. “To hear my children speak the language is incredibly inspiring.”
Audrey Casper, of Tsal’alh, came to the language carrying a different kind of grief. Her mother went to residential school and never spoke of what was lost. Casper learned to introduce herself, and her mother, quietly, acknowledged it. What was taken, she suggests, was never entirely gone.
“Regaining our language has really made me feel closer to the ancestors,” Casper says.
The four students are emphatic on one point, they weren’t alone. The degree was delivered largely online, which made it possible for students scattered across distant communities to take part. They organized a group chat, standing study sessions and shared motivational messages.
“There were times I was ready to just walk away,” Doss-Cody says. “I’d say, ‘no, I’m done, I’m out.’ And one of the students would say: ‘I hear you, but don’t quit. We want you to stay.’”
The graduates are quick to credit the fluent speakers who carried them to this point: Linda Redan, Q’excin Gerald Dick and Wetíta7cen Frank Andrew, and the late fluent speakers Lémya7 Neawana Michel, Tmícus Roger Adolph and N’an’atcwám Gary Harry—along with their teachers, linguists Lisa Matthewson and Henry Davis.
The Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency is the third of UBC Okanagan’s four Interior Salish language degrees, following programs in Nsyilxcn and NłeɁkepmx, with a Secwépemc cohort welcomed in 2025.
Students complete a two-year diploma at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology before transferring to UBCO for their final two years, in a curriculum built on immersion, cultural knowledge and the practical work of bringing a language back.
Rena Patrick, Dee Doss-Cody and Audrey Casper of the first cohort from the Bachelor of St’át’imc Language Fluency degree sit among their fellow Indigenous graduates during celebrations at UBC Okanagan in 2026.
That last part matters to all four. None of them describes the degree as an endpoint. Patrick intends to begin a Bachelor of Education degree and wants to build a language nest in her community.
Doss-Cody carries the language into 10 communities within St’at’imc Nation as Chief Officer of the Stl’atl’imx Tribal Police Service. She plans to teach when she retires. Hopkins-Rose is headed to graduate school. Casper wants to keep the language alive where she lives and works as finance manager for Lillooet Tribal Council.
What they share is a refusal to let the language end with the elders who held onto it through everything. Doss-Cody’s goal is smaller and larger than a career: she wants to sit with her mother, a fluent silent speaker, and have a conversation.
“We have tiny little conversations now,” she says. “She’ll correct me on how I say things, because that’s not how she heard it.”
Doss-Cody knows she’s still “a little more choppy” where the fluent speakers are “just fluid.”
But the correcting is its own kind of inheritance. After the schools, the silence and the whispering, reclamation sounds just like two people, mother and daughter, talking.
