Thank you.
My name is Dorothy Anderson. As mentioned, I am the elected secretary for the Metis Settlements General Council.
Most people don't know that the Metis Settlements General Council is the government of the only legislated landholding Métis in Canada. We are governed by the Metis Settlements Act, enacted in 1990. We have a 44-member general council that is solely responsible for governing the Metis Settlements, in collaboration, in many ways, with the provincial ministry of indigenous relations, but the Metis Settlements General Council itself is the government for the Metis Settlements.
[Witness spoke in indigenous language]
[English]
I was born with my language, which I can't call Michif, because it's Cree-influenced. I can't call it Cree, because it's Michif-influenced. What I call it is the Metis Settlements language, and it really is a hybrid of the cultures in the regions.
That was my first language. I remember starting to learn English when I was about four years old. I specifically and clearly remember the day I was dropped off at a preschool. I think it was a preschool of sorts. I had two ladies looking over me and hovering over me, and they were saying something. I didn't know what that something was, and they didn't know what my response was. I was asking them what they were saying.
It was a 100% communication breakdown on day one. At probably four years old, I ended up walking out the back door of that school and going home, because it was not my language. It was something that I didn't know.
[Witness spoke in indigenous language]
[English]
I come from Gift Lake, one of the eight Metis Settlements in Alberta. Our little corner of the world is somewhere in the Lesser Slave Lake area, if you're familiar with it.
It was not that long ago that people in Gift Lake started learning English. The first language of everybody my age is the Metis Settlements language. Everybody up to about 25 years old, in the present day, speaks it or understands it to varying degrees.
I noticed in the news release issued by Heritage Canada that there are statistics about the Metis Settlements that are false. In our exclusively Métis communities, speaking our Metis Settlements languages, our stats are actually higher. About 50% of our 8,000 people speak or understand it to varying degrees, and about 25% of our people are fluent.
I do need to shore up the comment that was made by Bridget. I have always been really confounded by the notion of writing our language in English. It's a very baffling notion, and it has contributed to the destruction of the language, because we don't spell out our language; we have syllabics. I think they're really almost extinct. I think I counted about eight people who can read syllabics in our areas.
What has happened, and what I've noticed very clearly, very predominantly, is that when children learn the language in the classroom, they come home and say a word you actually don't understand; they're not saying it the way it's supposed to be orally said, because there is an error in the notion of spelling it out and sounding it out—pronunciation and so on. I could go on for days on that subject.
I wholeheartedly agree, then, that the act does not say enough about oral learning and does not say enough about the importance of interconnecting the way of life with the language.
The Metis Settlements General Council conducted the first community health assessment that has ever been done in these hundred-year-old communities. That was in 2016. What our community members told us loud and clear is that they recognize that our culture and our health are dependent on our knowledge of the language. They didn't say they are intertwined; they said that our way of life and our health are dependent on the ability of our people to speak their language, because it's in our DNA. Our language is a living thing; it has adapted.
I said earlier that it's not Michif and it's not Cree; it's the Metis Settlements indigenous language. I would be concerned about a broad national effort being more of an imposition on what we already know, because we have practised our language. Many of us are practitioners. Many of us knew that language first, before we learned anything else.
When I see a bill that speaks, in my opinion, to what looks like a looming bureaucracy, it doesn't make sense to me. The answers are in our communities. If our language is going to be revitalized; if we're going to enjoy a reconciliation and, dare I say, a repatriation of our language, it's going to happen on the ground. We know that, and our community members actually said that in the community health assessment.
I was really debating mentioning this here at this table, but the Metis Settlements almost weren't here today. We had not been part of everything that led up to this. A couple of years ago I heard there was going to be a languages act. I think that's pretty much it. I haven't heard about what I know now to have been consultations or engagement sessions—some high-level coordination—going on. The Metis Settlements did not speak to the issue, and they did not inform the bill.
I think that the parties would be remiss in proceeding without making it about the community. I think it needs to be a little bit less about bureaucracy and a little more about people. It needs to be a little bit more about the resources that we need on the ground to rescue our language.
In the Metis Settlements, as I said, about 50% of the people know the language to some extent. What's tragic at the moment is that we are losing the language. We're watching our language dissipate. It's happening in real time. It's not something that happened a long time ago that shows a statistic of 2% knowledge today. It's something that's rapidly happening right now.