Thank you very much, honourable Chairman.
Good morning, honourable members. I'm Gerry Guillet, director of education and CEO for the Athabasca Denesuline Education Authority of northern Saskatchewan. Our authority is very young in its establishment. We were first organized and have been operating since August 2019. In establishing our authority to represent the far northern isolated communities of Fond Du Lac, Black Lake and Hatchet Lake first nations, we deliver educational programming for the schools. We have four schools of 1,300 students.
The Dene language, culture and land-based programming are an important part of our authority. It is our first strategic plan in improving the language abilities of our students. The remoteness of our communities creates many challenges for the authority, and we had to house our education centre in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. We can only reach our communities via air travel. One community has an all-season road, which is a 14-hour drive to the south in Prince Albert. Having said that, our land-based culture and language programs are our first priority in the strategic plan of our authority.
We have many aspects to our programming that are vital, including literacy and numeracy. However, given the culture where our students are not using their language at a significant level, certainly one of our major attempts is to improve and provide more language opportunities.
It is important to note that 75% of the staff in the schools in our communities are local and only 60% of them are able to speak the Dene language. We are planning that we would like to instill in our schools Dene immersion programming. We come across many challenges in that aspect, certainly, with the lack of resources in the Dene language. Our elders in our communities are very strong within their language, their culture and their faith dimension.
We certainly feel that the government's Indigenous Languages Act is one that we'd look at in terms of formulating all our strategies as we want to plan initiatives and activities for restoring and maintaining the fluency in our Dene language.
Our attempts to create technological tools and educational materials, including audio and video recordings, have met many challenges. We have not been able, as a new authority, to access the funds that are required for us to realize those visions, goals and aspects for our children and our community members within our communities.
Our coordinator, who is very fluent in the Dene language, has done a tremendous amount of work in the three years of our existence to improve significantly the ability of our teachers and our programs in our schools to include the Dene language in all the instructional materials as much as possible.
In the daily life of our students in the classrooms, our Dene language is spoken almost as much as the English language, despite the fact that we follow provincial curricula, all in English. Dene certainly is a language that is used throughout our schools and in our communities.
What we are asking for at this opportunity is the funding that our authority desperately needs in order to revitalize the language of our Dene people. It is being lost at a significant rate, and it is our goal to revitalize our language within our culture of our Dene people.
We have not realized any significant funding increase to date in order for us to move forward in translating many of the resources available in English into the Dene language, so that our immersion programs have the resources for our teachers to teach the language at a significant level.
I take this opportunity to express to the committee that our organization is a model. Although we are only three years old, we have established an organization founded on children coming first. Our board of directors is very determined. They hold their children, first and foremost, in their hearts and their deliberations.
All of our programming and initiatives are directed toward our children. In particular, our language is sacred to them, which we desperately want to revitalize. Our children need to learn more of their language, their land base and their culture. We are attempting to do that in revitalizing the language aspect within our communities and, in particular, within our schools. To initiate any kind of immersion program in Dene, we lack many of the resources to enable that vision to move forward.
It is my intent, Mr. Chairman and honourable members, to present to you today a challenge that the Athabasca Denesuline Education Authority faces in revitalizing our language, certainly according to Bill C-91, the Indigenous Languages Act. We are really looking at having more opportunity within the funding regime so that we can address those issues for our communities and our people.
I thank you for that.