Evidence of meeting #48 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was funding.
A video is available from Parliament.
6:30 p.m.
Liberal
February 1st, 2023 / 6:30 p.m.
Assistant Professor, University of Saskatchewan, Kâniyâsihk Culture Camps, As an Individual
[Witness spoke in Plains Cree, interpreted as follows:]
I would like to commend you for asking these questions. I thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.
If you look at mental health, that's the mind. How do we heal our minds? There are two things that we're looking at. When we look at the Maori, they call neurodiversity tânisi êtikwê. There is no term in our languages. We don't have it, but this terminology says we have to ask—we have to resort to our elders—how do we heal ourselves? If a person is not mentally or physically...when you look at the four quadrants, this is when we run to the elders in terms of healing.
When we went to Auckland four years ago, we went to listen to their languages. We went to do our research. We had the researchers, professors, directors and all of them, whoever was involved in all those universities in Auckland, and every one of us, every one of them, was looking at the mental health aspect. How do you heal your people mentally and physically? How do you approach the elders? How do you do that? Even the Hawaiians were looking at us. They were asking the same questions.
It's us, but it's us with the first nations elders and how we are sitting here together and how we are looking at this legislation, the Indigenous Languages Act. This is how, if we start gathering and having these types of engagements, we will lift our language and this is how we will lift ourselves.
6:30 p.m.
Chair, First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for that question, Lori. That's a really important one.
When we design and deliver language programs to children in the schools and in the communities—especially in the communities—when it's delivered in a way that's respectful to and full of integrity for the indigenous world and people are learning, in that way, healing takes place. We don't have to separate it. That's what takes place.
I really appreciate your question, because we have many people who are adults, particularly, who are relearning their languages or who are learning their languages, and it's a painful process. In those cases, we need to be able to deliver a program that acknowledges and recognizes that. It's healing that has to take place, not just with an individual but with a family and a community.
I did programs, for example, for people whom we call “silent speakers”. These are usually adults who speak the language and who learned their language as children, but because of their school experiences and other experiences, stopped using their language. We need to create programs and strategies that work with these people, because it's a very painful process to regenerate that language, and we need to be able to focus on that. We're not. We're not usually delivering programs for that population, and that's a huge population in our communities that we're not looking at.
Oftentimes, in our indigenous world, we don't separate the institutions, for example, of learning and health, but in the western world, that's what we do. Again, it's looking at all of the infrastructure that is in place and seeing the kinds of changes that need to be made to support the work that we need to do to reclaim, recover, revitalize and sustain our languages.
Thank you.
6:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marc Garneau
Thank you very much.
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to our guests this evening for their testimony and their answers to our questions. They have touched us with their knowledge on the subject that we are studying. We are very grateful to them to have taken the time to answer our questions. I know that their testimony will prove very useful during our study on indigenous languages, a subject that is extremely important and warrants a lot of attention. Again, our heartfelt thanks.
The meeting is adjourned.