[Witness spoke in Swampy Cree]

[English]

My western name is Ida Bear. I am at the University of Winnipeg, not the University of Manitoba.

I just want to do a qualifying statement. In 1967, I got involved in language and culture work. I remember sitting down on a Saturday afternoon with a few other people who were concerned about our languages in our communities—and we're separated, north and south. The south of Manitoba has better access to resources; the north does not.

At the time, in 1966-67, our schools were still federal schools. It was not until 1973-74 that we began to take control of our schools.

I have seen history in the making. I am in my winter years. I have seen development over the long time I've been a schoolteacher in the public school system. I have also been teaching for many years at the post-secondary level. One thing that I want to congratulate the federal government on is the languages act. It's been a long time coming.

When we were sitting down, eight of us, we were saying, “We should have our languages protected, like French”. It was more like wishful thinking at the time because nobody was listening to us when we were sitting at the department of education of the provincial government. We were teaching English as a second language, and then we had bilingual programs. All the kids who came to school spoke the language. We knew that the language was safe and healthy in the communities if the little ones came to school at age four.

Fast-forward to 2023. You can go to any school in Manitoba, and you will not have one student speaking their language, whether it's Dakota, Dene, Inuktitut, Michif, Cree—my language—Ojibwa-Cree or Ojibwa. We have seven language groups in Manitoba, and we're divided, north and south.

As a community person, and also as a grandmother and a great-grandmother, I was really quite surprised when I got an invitation to appear before the standing committee. I said, “I don't know anything about what happened with legislation. All I know was that in 2018 and 2019, there was discussion about the languages act and what it would do.”

Certainly, it's not as efficient because it's only been in operation since 2019. The work of language disintegration and culture has been in the making for 500 years, and so with this languages act, I sat back and said, “Hmm. It's going to take a while before we see progress.” I know because it took a long time for us to get moving in looking at language and culture, working with our communities to say that language is important and so is culture.

I'm the last remaining person in my generation from where I come from who has knowledge of language and culture as it was before modernization took place. We have different things happening in indigenous communities, and it's all modern. I think people from the past would be very shocked to see the kinds of things that are being done in languages and culture—good intentions.

With that, I wanted to make the point that many of us have been in this work a long time. I said, “Finally, we have a languages act”, but it's too bad I didn't know anything about it after it was passed and how the funding was taking place.

Yesterday and today, I quickly got some information. Thank God for the Internet that you can access information as quickly as you can for languages information. I looked for the Nisga'a. As a student, I loved Frank Calder, because he had the Nisga'a language and the elders recognized that they could go to court and use their oral history. I'm a storyteller by trade. I said, “Yay.”

Years down the road, the Nisga'a got quite a lot of money for documentation, and they have done the process with Thomas Berger and so forth when they were negotiating for their land claims. We didn't have that here in Manitoba. It was just our little groups that got together and said that language was so important. We initiated the bilingual program in 1973 and ran that for about five, six or seven years with the federal government and the provincial government doing a joint program. That was with Title IV in the 1960s in the States. A whole bunch of people went down to Rough Rock and Window Rock to look at the bilingual program.

The scariest thing is that we were trying to teach English. None of the children in our schools spoke English. Fast-forward to today, and none of the kids speak their indigenous language.

We do have funding. I have just a few seconds, and I have a list here. I think there has to be a better coordination in looking at the funding proposals. It has to be tighter. Also, the community, and I don't mean the chief and council or the mayor's office or anything.... I'm talking about community people. They have to be made aware of what language planning is and of the role of language, and then get themselves organized and structured so that they can be better able to have efficient language retrieval programs. Also, the last point—and my time is going here—is the Internet. We have really big issues with Internet service for our northern communities. I teach at a virtual high school here, and our communities cannot get online because they can't access the Internet to hook up with us where we teach language and culture.

Thank you.

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