You were never on the right track to begin with. That's because you didn't have the indigenous language experts who were there to help guide you and tell you what you need.
It takes five to seven years to become a fluent speaker of my language, and that's if you hear it every single day. If you're trying to bring children to start speaking it in this globalized society.... For us, in Quebec, we're challenged by Bill 101. All those things come together, and they push down all the things that have been pushed down for the last 150-plus years.
As Amos and Claudette have eloquently stated, we have so much richness in our culture that we want to bring to the children and youth so that they will still be able to speak it 100 years from now, speaking in the way that our elders understand. They can break down the words, and say this root comes from here and this comes from our creation story.
I think it has good intentions, and I really would hate to see any kind of political partisanship get involved in this. We need the money yesterday for us to be able to take the lead, because we know what we need. We will be accountable. We will have our audits and we will give you the receipts, if you want, but give us the money we need today, because our human resources are dwindling.
If this had been a predominantly male activity, I think it would have been well funded, but the majority of people who have been working in language revitalization, nickel-and-diming it all these years, have been women. There have been exceptions like Amos. I think that says a lot about how indigenous women are still looked at.
It's our nations. We are peoples with the right to self-determination, and our language is one of the richest parts of who we are.