[Witness spoke in Cayuga and provided the following translation:]
Warm salutations to the standing committee for the invitation to appear today.
[English]
I just wanted to thank the Creator in my language as well, who brought us here today to talk about our intellect and our languages. I want to thank the Creator for that.
[Witness spoke in Cayuga and provided the following text:]
Taehowehs ni: gwas gya sö.
[English]
My real name is Taehowehs. My English name is Amos Key Jr.
[Witness spoke in Cayuga and provided the following text:]
Ganya’de ni wage sho’de.
[English]
My clan is Turtle.
[Witness spoke in Cayuga and provided the following text:]
Gayegohonoh ni gye we tsode.
[English]
I am from the Mohawk Nation, but my parents were polyglots and they raised us in the Cayuga language. They were multilingual onkwehón:we speakers.
[Witness spoke in Cayuga and provided the following text:]
Agat drödenyo ni tse Ganohses gehono’.
[English]
I am also a faithkeeper of the longhouse in my community among the Haudenosaunee.
That's where I come from. That's my place in this world. I wanted to start my presentation in giving salutations to the Creator and to us.
I am pleased that I was invited to come and speak to you today. I know that I am on a time limit, so I'm going to go ahead. I have 14 points to ponder, as I call them. I'll go to those that I can get into my eight minutes or so.
I want to say that for the bill as it stands, because I'm a teacher, an educator, I give it a C+ at this point. As an educator, I give it a C+. I wanted to share that with you right now so that I can talk about my points to ponder.
My number one point to ponder is decolonizing the preamble. You might want to ask me a question about that later. We need to do that.
My second one is to decolonize the civil service and justice.
My third point is on the “Whereas” section of the bill on page 2. We might want to talk about that. It leaves out the impacts of our colonization, and our conversion to Christianity and the church are not acknowledged in the preamble, but we acknowledge other things. I think we need to talk about that as well: the impact of conversion among indigenous people in this country.
My point to ponder number 4 is that there is no detail that I could see significantly in the material about supporting the development of community language archives.
My number 5 point to ponder is that there is no mention of e-learning for indigenous languages.
Number 6 is indigenous language literacy and literary arts. There's no mention of it or supporting it.
Point to ponder number 7, on which I want to speak more in depth, is on the office of indigenous language commissioners.
Number 8 is on the parliamentary office of language commissioners, from our position paper that we submitted last July.
The number 9 point to ponder is implementing a framework that supports Bill C-91, which again is from our position paper on the office of commissioners.
Point number 10 is on the immersion education funding anomaly that exists right now for immersion education.
In number 11, I want to look at funding to support the intent and implementation of Bill C-91.
Number 13 is about supports to urban friendship centres in their delivery of language instruction or initiatives.
Number 14, of course, with my colleague, is about the support for the cultural education centres of Canada.
Those are my points to ponder that I have in my remarks. You'll be getting a translation of those.
I wanted to go back to a point. Once the bill is established and approved at some level, hopefully before this session of government is over.... We submitted a position paper called “Tseh ni: dwai: ho' de: Our Civilization's Sacred Thoughts”. The tradition in Canada is for language commissioners to be officers or agents of Parliament, so we propose that there be parliamentary offices of the indigenous language commissioners, similar to the parliamentary office of official languages supporting the Official Languages Act, especially for French language minorities outside of Quebec. This would also give Bill C-91, an act respecting Indigenous languages, a needed profile and teeth.
Why reinvent the wheel when a model already exists? It already exists in Parliament. That is a serious point to ponder.
In number 9, on implementing a framework that supports Bill C-91, again from our position paper, we recommend the office of the Inuit language commissioner, the office of the Métis language commissioner and the office of the first nations languages commissioner should be in place in order to carry out their various roles and responsibilities, each having the structure and framework that I will now describe.
To begin, there should be a central national parliamentary office of languages commissioners in Parliament.
Next is having 13 regional offices in the provinces and territories, national civilization-specific offices, with titles of regional commissioners or regional directors: one for the Métis, one for the Inuit and one for the first nations. These offices would work in co-operation with the local language commissions to ensure that they have adequate funding and provide suggestions and oversight for the reports and audits of the community language commissions on first nations communities.
The third aspect is to re-establish local commission offices on first nations communities. They will liaise with the provincial ones and other institutions such as indigenous cultural centres, friendship centres, the provinces, the Canadian military, the RCMP, the Senate and the House of Commons, where specific liaison arrangements may be required within the provinces and territories. These local language commissions would be responsible for community language planning and for developing annual and multi-year strategies and annual budget estimates to implement annual and multi-year strategic plans. In sum, it would be a three-tiered process or infrastructure that will support our languages from the grassroots up to the parliamentary offices in Ottawa here.
That's what we have suggested.
The Commissioner of Official Languages is an officer of Parliament, as you know, and is at arm's length from the government of the day, with a full set of responsibilities to report on the implementation of specific rights. The office has regional offices across Canada and operates with a staff of some 200 federal civil servants working to ensure that the linguistic vitality of French and English in minority settings is maintained and that the two official languages are not in danger. There's already a model here that we should mirror.
I have time, so I'm going to talk about the anomaly of immersion education funding.