Rethinking French‐as‐a‐second‐language education as a space for supporting Indigenous language work on xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam) land

Abstract In Canada, growing awareness of multilingualism in language teacher education requires educators to rethink how we practice language education. Many are increasingly questioning how established English–French official language programming can be reconciled with the reviving and reclaiming of Indigenous languages, and how we might think across Indigenous and Western worldviews in ethical, relational, and responsible ways. One such example is the redesign of a course that familiarizes future elementary teachers with a multilingual, place‐based approach to teaching French that incorporates knowledge of local ancestral and immigrant languages. Classroom discussions made evident ideological tensions as students and instructors navigated conflicting priorities, often pitting the need to learn instructional strategies for teaching official languages against the urgency to support local First Nations languages. By engaging our respective settler (European) and Indigenous (Hawaiian) perspectives, we identify moments of critical reflection to better understand how differently conceptualized approaches to language learning and teaching can coexist across language education programs in Canada and beyond.