Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. [Witness speaks in Dene] [English] My name is Cheryle Herman. I am from Clearwater River Dene Nation located near La Loche, Saskatchewan. I am a fluent speaker of the Denesuline language. I am here as an ambassador of indigenous languages, to share my own and other

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it would be going further in terms of preserving indigenous languages and maintaining indigenous languages and cultures. I recently visited Northwest Territories, and they are a long way ahead of us in the work that they're doing to maintain their languages there. They'

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. I know a couple of people who do that type of work specifically, simultaneous translations, and so I'm pretty sure they would be available, especially if they knew the cause, why we're trying to do this, and the importance of it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The way I've seen it done has always been the way you have it set up there, where you have the translators onsite, but I don't see why it couldn't be done remotely, just as we're doing here, through video conferencing.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] or aboriginal languages in general.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Okay. Are you speaking to aboriginal languages?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, we don't speak French. There might be a handful of people who are trilingual and would speak English, French, and Dene, but there are not many. We mostly speak Dene and English.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In our area, the area I come from, and the Far North included, I think we have three simultaneous translators.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think so. Definitely.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, actually, more people can write than translate.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The first member spoke on this, saying that it will be difficult to do because of the array of languages in Canada—indigenous languages. I'm just coming from the viewpoint of Saskatchewan where we have Dene, Cree, Nakota, and Lakota. Looking at the bigger context, I can see that

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There's the “t” dialect and the “k” dialect. In our area, only one other community speaks the k dialect, and that's Fond du Lac. If you got a translator who was speaking only in t dialect, the other communities in Saskatchewan would understand. So it wouldn't be an issue in terms

Procedure and House Affairs committee  They do court proceeding translations. They do assembly translations, such as for the FSIN and their local tribal councils. At their assemblies they do simultaneous translation as well. They also work with industry in terms of doing translation work.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Some of these people work on a contract basis, so I think they would make themselves available. Speaking for myself, I'm taking a day off work to be here to speak to you. If they value the importance of what we're trying to do, I think they would make the effort and the time.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In the Dene communities I work in currently, three of the schools I work with have Dene language programming. One is actually an immersion school from nursery to grade 3. All the rest of the other schools teach it as core, which is 30 minutes a day.