For our community, Oshweken Six Nations, as I said, we have an immersion school called Gaweni:yo. If you want to say it's faith-based, it's faith-based, but it incorporates all the sensibilities of a civilization.
I try to debunk the term “culture” even in my university courses, and I manage to do it. That's why I say we need to decolonize the preamble and get rid of the term “culture”.
Hockey is a culture. Figure skating is a culture. When we identify first peoples, they say that's their culture. We need to understand the essence of civilizations here. That's what we do within Gaweni:yo.
Now when I hear my young people speaking—after 30 years—they're bilingual. They have the essence of the language and they sound like seasoned speakers. It took one generation to do that, after the civil servants saying, “We're going to do you all a favour.”
I got to see that in my lifetime. Those people are leading our ceremonies. Some of them are educators. Most of them are self-employed, employed or in post-secondary education.
The last time I did a report on our school, just 2% were on social assistance. These are graduates of an immersion bilingual school system. That's what you want for your society. I don't know what the push and tug is about when we know what we need for our communities. That's the relevance of that for our community.
However, we need more funding. We need a school. We need a plant, a safe and healthy plant for our students, not something in the back of an arena.
In the meantime, we've built four brand new English-streamed schools in our community. The poor immersion cousin has to make do in an arena. That's what I'm saying here today. Can you imagine if we had a gymnasium for them? Who knows? Still we do our best.
With our Cayuga language, we have hundreds of speakers who are basically bilingual. That reflects the efforts of the community, of families, in making sure that they want this as part of their life, and looking at civilization in a healthy way, as onkwehón:we civilization rather than onkwehón:we culture. I debunk that term.
I'm glad, folks, that I can do a whole lecture at the university without using the term “indigenous culture”. My students get it. They understand what I'm saying when I talk about, in our province, the Mushkegowuk, Anishinaabe and onkwehón:we civilizations.
It conjures up another self-image: that we have intellect, intelligences, our own health and social determinants, all of our own ethics, our virtues. All of that is incorporated in our languages—