Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This was an exciting report to do and be involved in. At my house we speak many languages because we have the benefit of my wife having been able to speak her cultural language as well as my in-laws who are able to speak it. You really get a sense of value of language and how it is so important to culture and identity. When you go to communities and you see people lose their language, my heart really goes out to these people and you think of how language is so linked to culture and how when you start to lose the language and the meaning of the culture starts to fall off, my heart really goes out for that type of problem.
Going through this report and this review when we went out there on this special committee, it was exciting to see the participation and the passion by people and saying we have to stop where we are today. We have to get this train back on the tracks and solve this problem. When you get into certain communities such as the Gwich’in, what you will find is you have 250 or 260 speakers of the language left and as many people noted time and time again, the vast majority of those speakers are elders, and five, 10 or 20 years, that could almost permanently devastate that language by losing its… There are a lot of things that need to be sort of taken into account for right now.
This report I think is, first and foremost, a good report. I certainly hope that the government hears the call for action. There are many things that can be done and the recommendations sort of speak to that.
It has just been mentioned by our chairman, Mr. Menicoche, about the details that can be done, but the important thing that I really wanted to highlight during opening comments was the passion of the people wanting to save their languages, to keep them on for the next generation and the generations that follow that. If we can do anything, I would certainly like to see that we build up a partnership of accountability where we allow community groups to be more involved and take control and set the destinies of how they want their languages to be brought back. I would like to see things like a library or a resource centre developed so we can help build centres of expertise. I would like to see more elders brought into the school. They may not have the PhD or the Masters that traditional teachers may have, but there is a real connection when you can bring in someone of that type of experience, and young people can learn a lot even if it is just respect from our older generation. There are a lot of values that could be all tied in.
Although we visited many communities, there is one I wouldn’t mind highlighting, which was Deline. It was really remarkable how people jammed into the community hall there and wanted to talk and
how they, when we were done their meeting, still had a lot to say and wanted to make sure that we heard their voices. My appreciation goes out to that community, because they really threw themselves into making sure that they wanted to be heard. Yet again, I continue to use the word “passion” because it is so important. The passion and fight for wanting to make sure that their language survives was brilliant.
I don’t know if other people mentioned it, but the first leg of our community outreach in getting information, we had Mr. Beaulieu and I, from my perspective, would like to thank him for joining the committee. He is not a typical committee member, but we needed more folks to make sure that the review had enough membership and a good quality diverse membership. I want to thank him for joining on, because his participation helped and I thought it was great.
Mr. Chairman, the report is only as good as with what we do with it. If this turns out to be another expensive report that finds itself in a nice pretty or fashionable way on a shelf and something we can say we did but we do nothing with it, we wasted everyone’s time. The report is as good as we want to empower it, as well. Here is the enabling opportunity to make change. It really will come down to interests and measurement and, of course, the almighty dollar. I am hoping what gets proven out of this process is a plan that says, wait a minute, what is more important? Is it the money or is it finding a way to solve this problem? I certainly hope that someone will take account and say languages will be more important at this time to save than say it costs a little too much this time, maybe we should ignore it. When the languages become extinct, it will cost us a lot more money trying to find ways to bring it back after it is gone and I think it would be a real loss.
Back to what I talked about at the very start. From my own experience, language is very important in my household, so I have a deep appreciation for how important languages are across the Northwest Territories. Growing up here all my life, I have always known people and I always had a lot of respect for people who can speak more than one language. You can see a lot of pride taken in people who do this and you could also see a lot of sadness in people who can’t communicate with their children or their grandchildren because there is that disconnect.
Mr. Chairman, I just want to finish off with this last point. Language to me is a bridge between the cultures and the generations. It is a shame that some of these bridges have been falling apart. Now is the time to repair them. I look forward to government taking strong account to this in finding ways to bring it back. With Minister Lafferty who is in his own right someone in the Dogrib region that
they really aspire to because he speaks his own language. He presides over his region as a role model who uses his language regularly. I am hoping that type of leadership in that department will say this is so important. We are going to do something now. If we don’t have the money, well, we will find the money and we will find ways to make it work. Mr. Chairman, with that, I wish to thank committee for being part of this report and helping make it possible. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
