Evidence of meeting #142 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was groups.
A video is available from Parliament.
7:30 p.m.
Liberal
7:30 p.m.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Marsha, your commitment and love for your language and your people come through clearly. You said your culture and identity were lost, and through the strength of language, they are coming back. Through decolonization, you're reclaiming your identity. Clearly that's what all of us hope for, being able to reclaim identity for those who have been lost, so thank you so much.
7:30 p.m.
As an Individual
[Witness spoke in Oneida Sign Language, interpreted as follows:]
Thank you.
7:30 p.m.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Tracey, you said that implementation must be led by aboriginals and certainly we've talked about this through the course of our testimony. We've talked about the principle of policy-making, that it must ensure that those people the policy will impact have the majority, if not all the say, with respect to it.
The legislation lays out the appointment of a commissioner and people who will sit with him who are appointed directors, and they will be given the authority to carry out the responsibilities. Can you define how that would be different from how you would see the organizational model going forward?
7:30 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, First Peoples' Cultural Council
Yes, thank you.
We see a difference between the work that needs to go on to support making revitalization happen and the work of a commissioner. Again, they're the ombudsman. They take the complaints. I don't think they necessarily are the best option to support communities to deliver language revitalization programming across Canada.
First Peoples' is more than a grant-maker. We also provide training and a lot of support and work in partnership with communities to gather language data. We publish the status of languages report every four years. We've trained 475 people on language revitalization this past year alone because of the $50 million in funding that we received from the Province of British Columbia. We work with our advisory committees, our indigenous Ph.D.s and specialists, to develop plans and strategies that create outcomes that are going to result in language revitalization, strategies such as immersion through the mentor apprentice program and language nests.
It's complicated work and it can't happen without support. You don't solve the problem just with funding. There also has to be collaboration. As my elder, Marsha, just said, we have to walk side by side and collaborate over tribal areas where we share a language. Individual first nations need to work together, and we need to share our resources and support each other, and first nations people who have a desire and a passion for their languages should be supported to learn those languages no matter where they live.
I see the national organization as a strategy to have the opportunity to invite indigenous experts in revitalization to guide the work to support people across Canada as they're revitalizing their languages, similar to First Peoples'. We have a limited role, not taking up a lot of money, because I think that's what we had discussed in our consultations. People weren't keen, and I certainly wasn't keen at first because I thought we have what we need in B.C. We're taken care of. But there is a huge value in coming together across the nations and collaborating and sharing and supporting each other in this work, and I think that's only going to happen if we have a national entity.
7:35 p.m.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
I'm going to share my time with Randeep Sarai. Do I have time for one more question?
February 19th, 2019 / 7:35 p.m.
Liberal
Randeep Sarai Liberal Surrey Centre, BC
Thank you.
Thank you to all of you for coming.
Indigenous language and language itself is a subject very dear to me. I pride myself on learning the language, and it's probably because of multiculturalism when I was younger. Similar to what Max said, people like my brothers, who are much older than I am, originally didn't want to learn the language and neither did I. When you're younger, you want to assimilate—not even integrate; you want to assimilate—as fast as you can and shed any differences, but later you realize those differences are awesome, and they're what makes Canada great.
I feel one of the challenges with this bill has to do with the number of languages and the small number of people who speak them. Recording, revitalizing and maintaining them will be the biggest task, and I think we're going to have to look at some very innovative and modern ways to preserve them. It's not going to be your conventional professor or teacher. You're going to have to digitize in a very interesting way because there are a lot of dialects. I hadn't thought about sign language before.
I want you to be aware of that, and I think your point that the indigenous should not just be consulted but that they should spearhead this is very important.
Why do you have a great concern that the data itself should not be in the hands of StatsCan, but in the hands of indigenous handlers themselves?
7:35 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, First Peoples' Cultural Council
Thank you for that question.
I just want to address diversity first. In British Columbia we have—
7:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
I just want to give you a heads-up that you are already almost over time. Could you keep just to the data and work in the other information in other answers?
7:35 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, First Peoples' Cultural Council
Okay, sure.
There hasn't been a great experience with partnering with linguists and universities with regard to data. A lot of academics have worked with indigenous communities and copyrighted materials and then not made those materials available back to indigenous peoples. It's a huge problem. We have dictionaries. We work and provide all the data and then have to buy the dictionary from a non-indigenous linguist.
Library and Archives Canada got $20 million off the top of the new aboriginal language initiative money that came out. I honestly think that money should have gone directly to communities. If someone is going to curate and hold data, it should be indigenous peoples. At First Peoples' Cultural Council we have the FirstVoices.com program. It's software that allows indigenous communities to archive and collect their data. They maintain all the control and ownership of that data. Then it can be manipulated, pulled into curricula and apps, and all kinds of really innovative things because it's online.
To say that our language is safe in other people's hands is something that causes us great concern. We can't lose the control of our languages. We've lost so much already in terms of land and children.
7:35 p.m.
Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mrs. Ireland, I enjoyed your speech very much. It is the only time we have all had to put our smartphones down to listen to you.
7:35 p.m.
Conservative
7:35 p.m.
Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC
I will say it in English this time.
We didn't need an iPhone when Madam Ireland was speaking because we had to really pay attention. That's certainly big progress for all of us.
My questions are for Mrs. Herbert.
What you are presenting to us is really a model of what we want to do on a national scale, an entity that promotes indigenous languages. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience, your organization and how you support communities in various ways? You used the word “revitalization” a lot. Can you give us some details on this process and the financial aspect? Today, we agree in principle, but we are wondering how to proceed. I think you can shed some light on that.
7:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, First Peoples' Cultural Council
Thank you.
The model I was thinking would be similar to First Peoples', and we have really gone into the role of what that organization would look like in our full publication which we have made available, but we do see the role of the commissioner as separate from the role of the national organization. That organization could be governed by a board and also an advisory committee.
7:40 p.m.
Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC
I want to hear from your organization about where you started and what you did. This is actually what I believe you are doing at the smaller level than what we would like to do. Can you tell me about your model?
7:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, First Peoples' Cultural Council
Sure. We started in 1990. We're a provincial Crown corporation. We have a board of directors of 13 directors and then we have an advisory committee made up of a representative from every language in British Columbia. Our mandate is to revitalize language, arts, culture and heritage, so it's a holistic approach to cultural revitalization.
In early times, we supported cultural centres and found, though, that in order to support the languages we needed to support more organizations, more types of organizations, and shifted to supporting and prioritizing language revitalization. For many years we had a very limited budget. We were supporting 32 languages and 90 dialects with about $1 million a year. We acted as a non-profit, raising money, bringing in resources from multiple sources. In some years we could have up to 11 different funders.
Over time we worked with communities to identify the types of strategies that worked to revitalize languages. We decided to focus, in 2006, on immersion types of activities and focused on creating speakers in the community through early childhood development and language nests, through mentor-apprentice. We are now, in the last few years, really focusing on supporting communities to develop language plans where they collaborate with other communities that share the same language and focus on investments that are in multiple domains. One could say we have a school, that we're teaching the children, and revitalizing the language, but in fact, one needs to invest in multiple domains from baby all the way to elder in order to revitalize the languages.
We're really trying to shift with the $50-million investment from the B.C. government. We were able to share the story of how languages could be revitalized through a business plan that talked about the different areas we would invest in. Again, all these ideas and programs come from this reciprocal relationship with the community, because communities are the experts. We'll try something and they'll say that it doesn't quite work and we need to make a shift.
7:40 p.m.
Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC
One difference I see is you mentioned this holistic approach and the link between language and culture. Do you see that in what is proposed and is it important? It seems that language is always linked to a culture.
What are your thoughts on the fact that we need to link language and the culture? Do you take that into account in your approach?
7:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, First Peoples' Cultural Council
In our approach in British Columbia?
