Good afternoon.
My name is Chief Leroy Denny from Eskasoni. Welcome to you all from Eskasoni First Nation.
I know that in the opening statement on behalf of the Mi'kmaw Kina’matnewey, our executive director touched on a few things there with the ongoing funding that has been discussed. MK receives annually $500,000. We are currently managing the funding through the indigenous language component.
The current investment from the ILC funding provides the region with a total of $1.2 million, and the goal of the indigenous language component funding is to support community-based projects that contribute to the strengthening of our cultural identity, as well as the preservation and revitalization of the Mi'kmaq language, which my community has been really pushing for a long time, and MK has been pushing.
An example is our all-immersion school here in Eskasoni. Our community members Tom and Carol Anne have been contributing to the resources by making movies and translating movies and cartoons. Even as of now, they are in Paris for the beginning of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. I just want to call out to them for these projects, which are working quite well.
To put this into perspective, the funding we receive allows only approximately four or five projects. This means that we are forced to really choose certain projects to approve and others to deny, and we have to cut from everybody in order to provide a little to everyone. These projects are coming in, and the ideas that are coming in from our language communities are amazing projects.
We're trying to help our elders, because many of our elders are starting to pass away. Every time an elder passes away, they take the whole knowledge like a library with them, so time is of the essence here. It's really important that we have extra support and extra funding. This is simply not nearly enough of an investment. We really need to start working to move more quickly, move faster, and have more funds.
We have 13 Mi'kmaq communities in our province, and we need more funding in order to fully support everyone's efforts. We're starting to look into music and videos, and we're trying to really find this generation. Considering the generation that I grew up in, these are different now. There's a different generation, and we're trying to promote and revitalize our languages through technology and through movies in some way.
If this government is serious about the objectives set out in the Indigenous Languages Act, the funding must back the objectives. We have all the objectives laid out in front of you. Again, our concern is that it is limited. Certainly from this act, we need more room to work with our communities and all those who submit proposals, such as MK. Many proposals we submit so people like Tom and Carol Anne and our schools.... We're in the process of building a Mi'kmaq language studio to translate movies and cartoons and have young people be involved in creating and developing film for this generation for our communities.
Again, time is of the essence for us, as our Mi'kmaq language community is getting smaller and we're starting to lose more and more of our knowledge-keepers and especially our language warriors. Again, I hope that this helps to make it possible, and this is a plea that we need more funding for this and more room.
Wela'lioq.