I'll try.
The problems and the challenges we've been having concern project funding. At the end of March, my project will be over. We have teachers who are 65 and older who are teaching. They're the first language speakers in my community. It's a small community that speaks the oldest dialect of Kanien'-kéha. You cannot have continuity in your language programs if you have project proposals with exhaustive reporting, both financial and activity reports.
The other thing I wanted to address is the challenges among our own people, who feel that French and English are much better for youth to have, because that way they'll have a job. It's been marginalized even further, therefore, by our own people. That mentality has to change. We have over 400 words in Kanien'-kéha that talk about and describe the state of the mind. When we talk about a trauma-informed lens, we are seeing where we've come from and why we're the way we are today.
The challenge is not just funding, although that is a major one; in order to have a language program you need human resources. You need your human resources to be paid, so that they can pay their bills and buy their food at the grocery store, because we don't live like our ancestors. We need to be able to provide children with the language mentorship and apprenticeship programs that they need. It's really difficult if you don't have the money for it.
One recommendation I didn't mention was that we want a guarantee that the provinces and territories will not use the notwithstanding clause, if this bill passes and there are amendments, as we've all said today, and that they will not try to shirk their obligations to help us protect our languages.
The challenges we have are enormous in a very small community, but I think the heart and the passion of the people who have been revitalizing the language and trying to maintain it are so great that we're at the point—a critical juncture, I would say—that it's going to be second language speakers who will be teaching the children and youth, when we really need them to be first language speakers, as you know.
We need the experts. If we were talking about economics, you would have economic experts. We're talking about languages, and the first language speakers and the experts on language are not the ones leading the way. They should be leading the way throughout this whole bill. It should be the ones with the expertise. Whether it's the language commissioner, the program, the establishment of a framework or of measures to facilitate the provision of adequate sustainable funding, those should go to the people on the ground, but they're not going to them.
As for political will, our programs have been contingent upon whether or not the government feels that it's a priority or even whether the band council feels that it's a priority. In our community we don't have that kind of support, so we are struggling constantly. That's why we have been saying that we don't want any political bodies to have anything to do with it. It needs to be the experienced first language speakers and teachers.