Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Madam Committee Member. It's almost like Christmas here. You are asking us, and I am wishing.
I want to thank you for the very important question you've asked. I think the whole issue here is starting to put things into action. We say good words, but it's the system that certainly needs to look at what we are saying and put that into action.
I just met with our elders in the Northwest Territories, and we are starting to put our education system into place. We are a nation of people under our own laws, and our people are saying right now that we are following the federal government laws and the territorial laws that have a say over us, so it's still alive and well today in our justice system, in our language and in who we are as Dene, who we are as indigenous people.
We have our own laws, with our own elders. We have our own justice system. It may be apart from what we are subject to right now. If we want to look at education, we are taking our children and our youth out to the land and teaching them about the laws of the land, how we look at the land and how we would promote ourselves. Right now, there is no support in the system to promote our aboriginal way of life. We are not white people. We are indigenous. We are Indian. We are Dene. That's what we're asking for: the resurgence of who we are.
We understand racism very, very well. It's in our bodies. Ever since we started to go into residential schools, we have had the impacts of racism. As young people, as boys, we were not given names. We were given numbers in the residential school. We were told not to speak our language. The language was called “the devil” by the churches. How can we tell our grandparents that our beautiful Dene language is not from the gods, as they are telling us? How can the church tell us that those words are from the devil?
Those kinds of policies were backed up by the federal government. It was forbidden for us to speak our language or to eat our own food and to be with our families. Everything we were as indigenous people was wrong, so we had to learn a new way of life that was strange for us and is causing us a lot of hardship. We will never be any other persons than Dene people, indigenous people, and we have been fighting for that in our justice system, in our education system and in everything in our lives, even in how we look on our land. That's a really big task.
We're willing to work, but the federal government has to allow us the freedom of something bigger. As Dene people, we were always told to work together with the white people, to work with them but not to be like them, because we are Dene, and that's what we want to maintain.
However, through the residential system, the policies and the churches, everything made us wrong, so we always looked at it as if there was something wrong with us, because we were not taught to support our own language. We remember having soap in our mouths when we spoke our language. They put soap in our mouths to wash them out. The churches did that.
