[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.