Well I'm not certain that it did. Certainly there are mixed feelings about writing. Obviously these were primarily oral languages, as are all languages in the world except for those that are preserved solely in writing. The oracy, the oral language, is definitely primary and that is what the greatest concern is. Some people believe that writing can help with the retention of languages. Others don't feel that's a priority. There is that potential tension to it.
When we introduce a writing system, of course, spelling becomes the primary issue and whether we are going to standardize that. The other side of the writing system is, when we see a word written as we might write all our materials here at First Nations University, others without training in that writing system might look at the material and think, “Well, that's not how I say it”, because they don't have experience with the writing system. But of course the same thing could be said if we first see English or French written and don't understand how to read it; we might misinterpret what it says and not understand that.
The writing of the languages is a really important point and certainly a point that will come into the logistics of this as well, when we go beyond oral interpretation and need to keep a standard record of the proceedings in these languages. However, as a tool it can help unite the dialects of particular languages, because if you use a more standardized form that doesn't necessarily reflect the exact sounds of each individual dialect, ultimately with education and training in the writing system, it can help unite the different dialects, and a single writing system might be more useful in doing that than phonetic-based writing for each and every individual dialect.