[Witness spoke in Plains Cree, interpreted as follows:]

I would like to thank the Creator for allowing us to come and present on Parliament Hill.

I would like to thank you for the invitation.

I would like to thank the Creator for giving us this language and how much we love our language. We have a lot of people who have lost the language. We have a lot of people who don't know where they came from, especially the creation story, even the Dene, Nakawe and the Nakota people. Those are the creation stories that a lot of our people in our communities have no knowledge of where they come from. It is our elders who are wanting us, urging us, to teach our songs and our creation stories. We have creation stories that include the ice age. We also have the creation story of where we come from, where the mountains are spiritual, and even the fire, the wind and the flood. All those stories, they come from the island, from Turtle Island.

Those are the ones the elders wanted us to teach in our schools to retain those languages, even those stories that come from climate change. We don't know what the future holds in terms of climate change. We ask the elders, “How do we retain the language in terms of climate change?” We are taking the opportunity to take our kids outside in terms of a language base. What we are seeing when we look at the sun and when it rains.... We have never seen any rain in January, and now we are running to the elders. The elders are saying, “Do not be afraid. Go back to our ceremonies. Go back to our language. Go back to our creation stories. Those are the ones that are going to help us in the future. Let's go back to the creation stories.”

The other thing we have to look at and focus on is Treaty No. 6 and our treaties. We come from Treaty No. 6 territory. To our relative, I would like to welcome her for allowing us to visit her. She is one of our relations who is coming to invite us....

On the work that we are doing, we have forgotten our language. We have forgotten our promises. For all the teachings, we are going back. We know that in the past our spiritual ones and our visionaries were the ones who came and prophesied that they knew that our brothers were going to come, that they were coming to our country. They were coming to our Turtle Island. They were all going to come here. They knew that they were going to work together. They told us. They advised us. They asked us to work together. We have to work together but never forget where we came from, never forget our languages and never give up our ceremonies.

This is what I wanted to tell you: Work closely together. In the past, our elders used the pipe. The pipe was always in the forefront. The pipe is the most ceremonial item that was used in terms of languages, in terms of protecting languages, and where we are trying to run, we seek the advice of our elders, our knowledge keepers.

A lot of them we have not seen. They're in the spirit world now. The ones we sat with in the past loved the language. They advised us, “Teach your young. Teach your elders how to use the pipe. This will keep them in the spiritual world.”

I want to talk a bit about myself. I've worked at the University of Blue Quills, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, the University of Victoria and the WHEAT Institute. These are the different institutions that I have worked with. These are the institutions, the universities, that are reaching out to us. They are running to us.

We have in our own community a lot of elders. We seek and sought the elders. This is where we have a lot of our spiritual leaders and knowledge keepers. We seek their knowledge. They're the ones we rely on.

We sat with Marc Miller today. We presented our language and the importance of retaining our language, and that we really need to work together. In order for us to retain the language, we have to work together.

There's one other thing. I would like to thank Canadian Heritage for all the effort and all the work it's put into the development of the languages act. I would like to thank it. It has helped us in the past, and it will continue to help us in the future.

This is all I wanted to say for now, but I will want to talk about all we do in terms of languages in my own community.

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