[Witness spoke Wendat]
Tiawenhk inenh
[English]
I can tell you that it is truly difficult to reawaken a dormant language and that it requires a lot of funding.
There's another problem. With the current funding model put in place by the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we are not able to measure results on a monthly or yearly basis. The results from my community and many others must be measured over decades.
It is therefore difficult to set up projects when there's only funding for nine months. You have to organize the project from beginning to end. You have to be satisfied with what you get and set new timelines. Of course, we never get an answer to our request in time to start work on the date that we have set.
What's more, planning is really complicated; we can never do any long-term planning. And yet, that is precisely what we need right now: funding and support. That would allow us to establish long‑term plans. Otherwise, spoken Wendat, even in the Wendake community, will decline and we won't be able to record the knowledge of speakers who are still alive. We are also feeling tremendous pressure. We need that long‑term funding.
There is too much to do and not enough time and the deadline is not realistic.