I think all of us sitting here as well have had some great teachers. Our own elders and our wisdom keepers, our knowledge keepers, have encouraged us to move forward and to keep the faith and keep going, regardless of what happens.
I'm a professor at the University of Toronto. I tell my students that it's our resilience. Despite all the odds, that's our resilience in play. I still can stand here in one of the richest universities in Canada and speak to you. I never aspired to be a professor, but here I am now talking to you about how we ran off the rails 150 years ago, and now we have to try to get back on.
One thing is to debunk the term “culture” when we engage indigenous peoples, because all of that is sewn together. All of those traits and characteristics, including our moral compass and our moral characters and our theologies and our spiritualities, are sewn together by our languages.