I've worked with the indigenous colleges, and that has always been one of our arguments. We've always said that perhaps what we need to do is to gain official status and get the amount of money we really need to do this important work, because all of our first nations colleges are doing critical work. They're doing the research, the development, the implementation of courses, or many times would like to, as there are a lot of initiatives on back burners because they do not have the funding.
Indian Affairs, in their wisdom, or lack thereof, in the last few years used to have monies that went off the top of first nations dollars in education that went to post-secondary. Off of the post-secondary dollars, they took a little bit to give to our first nations colleges, but as I said, in their lack of wisdom, those monies became proposal-driven, and it was devastating to our first nations colleges. What happened? In B.C. none of the indigenous institutions got any money. In Alberta, the first one to be hit was Red Crow Community College, from the largest tribe in Canada. The next year we got hit.
Now, over the last two or three years, we have not received any federal funding. It's all going to public institutions that will teach us who we are, teach us our language. We've talked to them, and they don't have the programs we do. Our students come to us and say, “I never got this at that public institution. I'm so glad I'm coming here, because I'm getting it.” What we have been saying over the years is, wouldn't it be wonderful if our languages were recognized as official languages, and then the dollars would be pumped into them?
I want to thank the other ladies for talking about funding stability, long-term funding, because those have always been issues for our first nations colleges. We operate on year-to-year grants, on shoestring budgets, never quite knowing what is going to be funded. It would be so nice to know once and for all what we're going to be able to do in the years to come, but we never get that opportunity.