Thank you for the question.
I think what you highlight are certainly the impacts of the residential school experience, of that child's grandparents either having successfully avoided residential schools or being able to survive it with the culture intact in some manner, and of that allowing them to be parents and move on. I think that's an important dynamic of what you describe.
I think this idea that our culture is static, that after contact and signing of the treaties in the west, and the plains in particular, with the long headdresses and the teepees...if that's the view of it, then we should fully anticipate that our British brothers and sisters would have powdered wigs and covered carts and that kind of.... Cultures evolve, as our culture has certainly evolved.
With respect to languages, once they're gone, they're gone forever. We can't go back to a homeland somewhere, and reintegrate back into that culture, back into that language. When those cultures die, when the Beothuk died, when other nations die, those languages are gone forever.
We go back to the elders and we ask what should we be focusing on. When we do drug and alcohol programming, when we do employment training programming, why don't we just go to the mainstream institutions...? Because they don't work. If the mainstream institutions worked, then we would have success in these interactions right now. It's about rooting those programs in culture, and the language is in the culture. Our elders say that culture is the language. It expresses world view. It expresses your position in the cosmos. It expresses how you interact with nature. It expresses all aspects of your identity. Once you lose that, where do you go to define that identity? This makes culture so critical.
The push really is to invest in those cultures. You mentioned the Blackfoot immersion program. There's an incredibly successful program in the Six Nations, where they're doing immersion in Mohawk and Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa for their communities. It's really a push that requires support, because it is so tenuous right now. The projection is that of the 50 aboriginal languages now, only 12 are going to survive a generation: what can we do today to stop that? That is a great legacy for Canada: to take this on as a project.