Good afternoon. I'd like to acknowledge that we're meeting on unceded Algonquin territory, and I want to thank the committee for allowing me this opportunity to speak with you today.
I'm probably going to be a lot different from what I just heard in the last panel. I think it was a good opportunity for me to hear what was said.
I'll give you some background on the Gabriel Dumont Institute. We are a Métis post-secondary and cultural organization. We're based in Saskatchewan and we are considered to be the cultural and education arm of the Métis Nation—Saskatchewan.
In 1976, our elders were at a cultural conference and they decided that the only way our culture, history and language were going to be preserved and then told from our own perspective was if we formed an institute of our own. By 1980, the Gabriel Dumont Institute was founded based on that recommendation from the elders and the others at the cultural conference.
In 2020, we will celebrate our 40th year. On the education and training side, it's the design and development and delivery of educational programs for Métis. This was, I think, the beginning of what we would call our Métis affirmative action program. We're not asking anyone to lower the bar. We're asking to get our people to the bar so that they can be employed and contribute as others have and do.
The flagship program for that was Métis teacher education. Over those 40 years, we've graduated over 400 Métis teachers, and they're making a huge difference in the education system. They're almost all based in provincial schools. Initially, it was to show Métis children that they could become teachers if they wanted to, but it has gone beyond that to show the capability of Métis people as educational leaders and to ensure that Métis content, perspectives and ways of knowing are a part of the curricula. They are mandated to be part of the curricula but how they are delivered and whether they are delivered is spotty. That's that story.
Then on the culture and history arm, we have the world's largest repository of Métis-specific items in the Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture. It is accessed about 40,000 times a month by places all over the world. That's unique visits, not repeat visits. We're generating interest not just in Saskatchewan but across Canada as well.
Regarding our language, it's an inextricable part of our culture and heritage and yet it's in peril right now. The Métis nation is original to Canada. There's no other place that it was formed first, and that also goes for our language, Michif, which predates Confederation. As you're probably well aware, we called ourselves the new nation, and we had quite a huge role in the fur trade. We were the middlemen—and, I always like to add, the middle women—of the fur trade because those alliances were good business practice. But they were also the birth of the Métis nation, because our people could both liaise and make familial connections with both first nations and the Europeans who were doing business at the time.
Then as time went on, we morphed into our own culture and developed our own language. That's Michif and it's unique. It hadn't existed previously. Some of the technologies and ways of doing things were unique to the Métis as well.
We consider people like Louis Riel to be nation builders, because he was very instrumental in making Canada. Then of course after the first resistance in 1869-1870 and then the big one in 1885, Métis lost that battle but we won the rights battle. Métis went into hiding because it was very dangerous to identify as a Métis person after that. You were pretty much guaranteeing that you would be unemployed and perhaps further persecuted for being Métis.
We were not recognized by the government in any way. Our people were forced to disperse, because again, for the second time, we were kicked off our lands and told to go elsewhere. Then I think most of you would be familiar with the big rip-off of the scrip process. That was a process for getting compensation for leaving those lands, but there were so many speculators around at the time who took advantage of that that the Métis people didn't get the land or compensation and were dispersed.
I consider that one of the reasons our language, Michif, is in such peril at this time.
It is an awful tragedy that first nations were relegated to less than 1% of the land base of Canada and needed a pass to leave, but I do envy the fact that they were congregated into a spot where their language could remain intact until more recently. Their languages were used in the community and passed from generation to generation.
As the Métis dispersed, not only were people spread out and not able to stay in those strong family groupings, but it was something that you hid. There are oral stories of our people hiding bannock and of not speaking the language when others were present, so we also got the messaging in mainstream schooling that our language and culture were of no importance, and again, we were being taught from the historical perspectives of non-indigenous authors. We'd have to hear about the crazy rebel Louis Riel, how he rebelled against the Government of Canada and how the founding fathers were the great heroes of Canada.
Those were hard messages to choke down at the time, and then a pan-indigenous approach to who the indigenous peoples of Canada are. I'm not a fan of that term. I consider it a lazy throwback to the term “native” or even “aboriginal” in that it's not distinctions-based. If the average person, the average Canadian, were surveyed, if you asked them what “indigenous” means, they would say “first nations”. We get memos with such things on them as “indigenous and Métis”. We are indigenous people.
We finally were recognized, but we're way behind. After the efforts of Métis Harry Daniels, who took the Canadian government to court, we were recognized in the Constitution Act of 1982, under section 35, so it has not even been 40 years since we've had any formal recognition.
More recently, in 2016, the Daniels decision was another victory, initiated by Harry Daniels, in which the federal government agreed that they should have taken responsibility for the Métis as they did for the Inuit and the first nations.
Therefore, in terms of those issues, of us having to go underground, of being dispersed and of having mainstream schooling not affirm who we are as an indigenous people and then of no value for us to keep our languages.... I never say we “lost” them; I say they were “taken”, because of those factors.
The recent exhibition by Library and Archives Canada that calls the Métis “Hiding in Plain Sight” is fairly accurately titled, because we have been there all along. It's just that we haven't been recognized as being there, so we're hoping to change all of that.
Michif is “critically endangered”, and that's not my term. That's a United Nations term. There's a matrix they use to identify what kind of danger a language is in, and that is the worst place for it to be. “Extinct” is zero speakers, but when you have only the grandparent generation speaking the language and their children and grandchildren do not speak the language, that's a critical factor.
They are dispersed, so they're not even living with people or within a community where they can practise the language, so that is another factor.