Merci. Mahsi cho.
You covered a lot of ground in your questions and observations, and I thank you for them. Many of our people think there are many parallels between the francophone language and our indigenous languages. However, our observation here has been that over the course of the last 100 years, there have been mostly deliberate colonial practices and policies that were designed to weed out our language and weed out our practices. In many cases, it's on the law books that some things were outlawed, whether it was dancing or singing or in some cases speaking the language.
We're trying to reverse a trend that's well over 100 years old. The colonial system spent billions of dollars to get the language out of our people, and we are saying, in the spirit of reconciliation today, that as much of an effort should be brought forward to help us reintroduce it or sustain it while it's still alive. Like all languages from any place anywhere, there is sustained funding for its continued use, growth and development over the course of time. Unfortunately, it's not unique to Canada that indigenous languages are vastly underfunded or not funded at all. It's usually through volunteer efforts and the sincere hearts of others who are trying to make sure that language survives.
Just quickly, I want to share with you why that's so important. It's related to your question. In Canada and as first nations, we deal with a lot of negative social indicators of our peoples—low education rates, incarceration rates, low health conditions, low employment and so on—and those negative social conditions have been around. The summation by many of the first nations and SGIGs is that we are dealing with a lost people, a people trapped somewhere in between two worlds—a modern western world and our way. They have been deliberately moved away from that and are lost. Why are they lost? They're lost because embedded in our language are the values, the customs, the traditions and the beliefs that we have as indigenous people and that really ground us in who we are, as all languages do for all people.
So we're in this weird place and time, and we believe long-term sustained funding is necessary not just for the sake of helping to preserve indigenous languages; it's also to bring other values and healthy families back to our communities, where we really will make a difference on the symptoms—I call them the negative social indicators—and really start making some true, good relationships here in Canada.
Thanks.