Thank you, Cathay.
I remember when you and your husband came to our community and I took you around and showed you some places, our village, our school and our band administration office. It was really great to have you and your husband in our community.
This gives us an opportunity, as well, Cathay, with the Good Spirit School Division. It opened an avenue or a door in regard to the curriculum and its being in the school system. Since some of the communities or some of the schools don't know the background and the culture of the first nation communities that are in that district, we made an agreement with the Good Spirit School Division. It had been over 40 years since the last agreement was signed. This agreement gives an advantage to us to put our language, our history and all the things that we went through as a first nation into the non-first nation schools. There's also land-based training to bring the schools out to our community to give them some cultural activities that they can use, that they can participate in, so that they know what our children are being taught in our nation.
With Isabella opening up that door and with the teachers as well, we have a cultural room in the school already, and some of our elders go there to share stories with those who are interested. We're not trying to push it onto them, but here's an opportunity for us to let the non-first nation schools know a little bit more about us, as we learned a lot about the Europeans coming to Canada.
When I was in school, I never learned anything about my background. All I learned about was the Europeans, but now here we have a new agreement that we can put forward, and we're doing that in our school to learn more about our language. Our language was lost as a result of history, but now we're trying to bring it back and revitalize it. It's also to make all cultures, whether it's Ukrainian, Russian or whatever in that community, be proud of who they are and wear their attire any time of the day. It doesn't have to be just January 4.
Thank you, Cathay.