As I said earlier, because we spent so much time away from our families during the residential schools era, people my age--49--some of our people, some of our former students, refused to speak their language, so therefore their children did not have that language spoken to them at home.
We do have a second language program in all the schools, and we have teachers, but in the early 1970s when we started teaching the language in the schools, we basically took people off the street who were fluent in the language, without any teaching background--people who did not know how to teach a language. I mean, we were the first teachers of the language, but when you get into a formal setting...our people did not know how to teach the language or did not know how to use resources.
We just put them in as fluent speakers, so there was no formal way of teaching our students the language in the school environment. Our elders and our leaders have said over the years that the natural environment is for our young students to be out on the land in their home environment, surrounded by their parents, their grandparents, and their extended family speaking to them. This has not been the case.
A lot of our elders, at the time of our parents, lived out on the land, so therefore we did not have that opportunity to relearn the language. And we did not have a curriculum. We just put the teachers in the classroom and told them to teach the language. It was up to the teachers to develop the materials and to teach the language the best way they knew. This resulted in a lot of failure.
Today in the Beaufort-Delta we have a second language curriculum that has been translated into Gwich'in and the Inuvialuit languages, so the teachers are now being trained to use that curriculum to teach the languages. We are beginning to see some success.