Tiawenhk for this question.
I think there's a lot more that is involved. I think the metaphor of rebuilding is a useful one to think of here, because we're not going to be able to simply go on the Internet for language teachers, find material to teach for English or French and pull it into the classroom and have supports and environments where students can be immersed in the language outside.
Those things don't exist. Those supports don't exist. Those resources don't exist. We need to build them, and for my community, without speakers—we're trying to build a new generation of speakers—that takes an enormous amount of time.
We need funding for research. We need funding for curriculum development. We need funding for teacher training. We need funding for accreditation. We need funding to build a language authority and to actually pay individuals to be hired to be in full-time adult immersion programs, like the programs that exist at Ohsweken Six Nations or Kahnawake. That's where we would like to head, but with the current funding we have, there's nothing that is going to get us even close to that.
We know that we're not being provided even adequate funding for a minimum of things we need to do, for essential things that we need to do in order to reawaken our language. In terms of the budgets for English and French compared to indigenous languages, when you think about how many indigenous languages there are here in Canada compared to just two colonial languages that have caused this damage, it really is shocking to think of the disparity between the budgets that are allocated by the federal government.