I did a presentation on Monday, just the other day, and we were talking about language and self-esteem. I asked a question: Who am I? Well, you can look at me externally and say, “You're an indigenous woman. You're an older woman. You might be a great-grandmother.” But nobody can tell by looking at me that I have worked years and years and years in post-secondary institutions and also in the community, which I think is very important.

I too came out of residential school. After spending all my childhood there, my youth, I came out a changed person. How do you have healing? You do healing through the language and culture. When I went in, I was five years old. Already I had the language. I had my values and teachings from my grandparents. When I went in, everything was different. There was a lot of corporal punishment and abuse, sexual abuse and physical abuse. You came out as a nobody with no self-esteem.

We're advocating through the language and culture program things like land-based education and using traditional doctors—I'm one of them—for healing of the soul and spirit, but we don't get funding for it. We've been running programs like that for a long, long time without any assistance from the federal government. It's through our local initiatives. I think about it this way: Money doesn't really heal anything, but it sure as heck would help us to do the work in the area of healing. For example, a lot of people say that today it's contemporary times and the past is dead. No, it isn't. The past is just hanging over you with all its negativity, all its hurts and all of whatever it was they did with colonization, turning us into western automatons leaving behind our identity—who we are.

I'm Cree through and through. I do have French on my grandfather's side. I have Scottish on my maternal side, but we all identified as Cree in culture and language. You know, up to five years old, you already have that language. You never lose it. It's like a computer. It's inputted. It's just that psychological processes come into play where you can't get it out.

That was the case for me. In 1974, when I began to get involved in languages and culture, I couldn't even speak my language. I had to get it out, but there were so many obstacles. There were psychological obstacles. There was panic, I would say, in using my language, because there was too much corporal punishment when we'd use our language. In terms of cultural practices, when my mom used to come and visit us, there would be a supervisor. We had 10 minutes with my mom. She would try to bring traditional foods. They would just throw it out as not fit for dogs. There was this demoralizing way of treating us.

I agree with you that within that languages act we need our indigenous doctors, our healers, our psychologists, our psychiatrists, people like me and ceremonial people to be paid for the work we're doing and not to just be given tobacco in a piece of coloured cloth. That doesn't pay for your food. That doesn't pay for your accommodation.

Many of the people doing that work are long gone. The last one died a month ago. We really don't have that pool of traditional healers who do the language and culture work. Since 1967 we've had a core group of us working toward the revival of language and culture. Through the work in language and storytelling and cultural-based activities and ceremonial activities, many of us found healing.

Where we found healing, we got our voice to say, “Okay, we're going to put the western ideology aside. Now we're going to spend time looking at us, at who we are as a people.” We're very diverse, but as indigenous peoples we have universal principles.

We have soul; it's in our language. We have spirit; it's in our language. When we speak our language and we openly speak it, the Creator Otipéyihcikéw hears us and we begin to heal. We need people who are healthy, who are healed, to be able to reach out to the people who need healing.

When I quickly went over the Indigenous Languages Act, I was thinking about that. I said to myself, you know, through language and culture we get healing. We get land-based education. We go to ceremonies. We go to sweat lodges. We go to shake tents. We go to pipe ceremonies.

Our psychologists, our dreamers, are different types of doctors. They're healers of the brain. Nobody recognizes us. Some of us have three, four, five or seven Ph.D.s in ceremonial aspects. We're still very much looked down on, and they say, “Well, you don't have a Ph.D. from a reputable university. You didn't spend nine, 10 or 11 years doing a study.” Our people have worked and lived all their lives in what we call miyo-pimâtisiwin, “the good life”. How do you get at that good life? Practise your culture. Practise your language. Eat your traditional foods. Have your ceremonial name.

My name, and it's kind of comical, is Ká-kisíyásit. I wanted a beautiful name like “Yellow Buffalo Woman” or “Blue Robin”, or all of those nice names. When I got my name, it was Ká-kisíyásit, meaning “one who flies fast”. I told my medicine name-giver, “I don't want that name.” He said, “It's not I who gave your name. It's Otipéyihcikéw, the Creator, who gave you that name.” One who flies fast—that's here, the soul, the spirit.

You can cover a lot of territory for healing, for spiritual teaching, by teaching the language, by being able to pray in a language when you're asked or to counsel somebody who sits there and says, “I don't feel like living anymore. I don't speak my language. I don't know any ceremonies. What am I going to do?”

You went into that whole phase. When you had your people doing the consultation, I wasn't involved, so that part was missed.

I agree with Dr. Megan—I don't know how to pronounce your last name, and my Cree gets in the way—that we should actually look at redrafting or making amendments to include that.

Do you know something? I think it's a positive thing. Back in 1967 we said we needed to save our languages. How many years ago was that? It was roughly 40 years ago. This is 2023. We've lost many of our languages. It wasn't enough for some of us to do the little piecemeal things we were doing. My colleague and I covered all the communities in Manitoba. We set up language working groups back in 1983 and 1984. Once we left, because we didn't train the trainers, it died, and there was no ongoing work done on working with the community, the parents, the grandparents, the ones who have no education.

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