Paul Bickford
Northern News Services

Fort Smith (Oct 17/05) - Language has always been important to Marla Chasse. "Language is my life," says the teacher at Joseph Burr Tyrrell school in Fort Smith.

She is fluent in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian. Although she teaches French, the language closest to her heart is Portuguese, since she was born in Montreal to immigrants from Portugal and values her heritage.

Marla Chasse displays Portuguese olive oil and a Portuguese flag drawn years ago by one of her children. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

"It's a very rich culture," she says, noting she went to a Portuguese school once a week when growing up in Montreal and would often visit Portugal.

Chasse says her own children, now aged 15 to 21, did not grow up in a Portuguese environment, so she has worked hard to pass the culture and language on to them.

She says they can understand the language, but haven't had much of an opportunity to speak it. "They've got it in them."

Chasse left Quebec when her children were young, first moving to Alberta and then to the NWT five years ago.

"I left Quebec because I wanted my kids to learn English," she says.

Under Bill 101 - a controversial provincial law promoting the use of French - her children would have had to go to a French-language school.

Chasse, 44, says she knew she was going to be a teacher from the time she was 13.

At Montreal's McGill University, she earned a bachelor of education degree, specializing in French as a second language. "I had this gift to speak languages," she says.

In fact, she learned Italian in three months so she could speak to her former mother-in-law.

Chasse believes immersion is the best way to learn a language.

"If you want to learn Spanish, go to Mexico for the summer."

In her classroom, she speaks only French to her students.

Chasse and her family moved to the NWT five years ago, and she says she loves the North. In Yellowknife, she worked as an interpreter at the Legislative Assembly and at the Supreme Court.

She later taught at the French-language Ecole Boreale in Hay River, until moving on to Fort Smith at the start of this school year.

Chasse, who got her French last name from a previous marriage, has interesting family ties in Portugal.

Her father's family owns a winery, and an uncle was once the director of the country's national soccer team.

Chasse also has some royal heritage. Many generations ago, a Spanish princess married into her mother's side of the family.

Chasse - who's birth certificate name is Marla Grace de Sousa de Marques Esteves Mateus - says she is proud of her family's origins and language.

"I work so hard to keep it alive," she says. "I owe it to my grandmothers."