[Witness spoke in the Líl̓wat language]

[English]

Lorna Williams is my English name. Wánosts’a7 is the name that my people call me. I come from the land of the Líl'watul, in a place called Mount Currie in British Columbia. I taught at the University of Victoria and retired from there.

I am the current chair of the First Peoples' Cultural Foundation. I'm the past chair of the First Peoples' Cultural Council. These are organizations that work on revitalizing, recovering and maintaining the indigenous languages in British Columbia.

My work with our languages began when I lost my language at residential school. I attended the St. Joseph's Mission in Williams Lake and had to relearn my language. It was fortunate for me that the language in my family was strong, and that I lived in the old part of our village where the old people had never been to English school. I was able to recover and to recover my language. I learned English while I was in the hospital.

As a child, I came to see the challenges and the beauty of language and communication. I feel that's where I began my education.

In 1971, 1972 and 1973, my village of Mount Currie was the first community in B.C. to take over its own education. This was a change in government. One of the things that our community said was that they could see that our language was beginning to shift. More and more people were speaking English than our language, which was really different, and they said, “We have to stop this.”

One of the challenges they gave us was to figure out how to keep our language thriving. This was in the early seventies.

I'm sharing this with you so that you know what my background is. I've been involved with K-to-12 education, both at the band-controlled school level and at the public school level. I was a consultant for the Vancouver School District for 15 years. There, I saw children from across Canada in Vancouver. They were children who no longer had a connection to their homelands. A few did, but many didn't. I saw the challenges there that need to be overcome to help us follow our right to our languages. I then went to work for the Ministry of Education in B.C., and then to the University of Victoria, where I finished my employment career.

In 2019, I was present at the UN when it became the International Year of Indigenous Languages. There was so much hope and positive talk about indigenous languages around the world. In 2019, I was so pleased that, finally, the country of Canada was acknowledging and recognizing that our languages exist, and putting into place a process of our being able to work together to do something, finally, in a legitimate way for our languages.

The challenge is a big one for Canada, which has two official languages, both colonizing languages that continue to colonize our people, not just here in Canada but in many places around the world. One of the challenges for the government to make something of this act is to determine whether it has the courage, the audacity and the zeal to look at itself honestly and to look at how all of the policies, the practices and the habits that have became entwined and entrenched to protect English and French keep indigenous languages down. You have to be brave to look at what those practices are, at what those policies are, because they have to be addressed to shift and to change what we have become so habituated to in this country.

We also need to be able to look at the impositions of the Indian Act and be brave enough to change it. What has it done? It has divided us, making some status and making some non-status. It's dislocated, dislodged and relocated people, indigenous people. This act has to be able to serve all indigenous people. That's what you set out to do. It's important then for us to know what it is and what the challenges are that we face. For example, today there are children who have half-status. There are children who have quarter-status. Do they have a right to their language? Will they be served under this act? That's what you have to be able to look at.

We need to be able to look at the infrastructures that are supposed to serve the revitalization, the recovery, the maintenance and the sustaining of languages. I want to speak here about education, because the institution of education has been the instrument that has been used to destroy, to annihilate, our languages and our people. We also need to know that education is a powerful institution and that it can serve to support the work that we need to do, but it can only do that if we're brave enough to redesign it, to question it and to learn from indigenous people who've devoted their lives to trying to strengthen this.

For example, we need indigenous language teachers in schools. There's a demand for them. Schools have used fluent speakers, our elders in our communities. They've never been recognized, acknowledged as teachers, but they do the work. They have figured out how to do it with no post-secondary training.

There is not one single teacher education program in Canada where indigenous language teachers can get the education they need, the learning they need, to do this challenging task, to get a credential and to be recognized and paid as teachers.

Right now, Mr. Garneau, across this country there are many teachers of indigenous languages, and they're paid a pittance because they're not recognized as teachers. That's why I say that we have to look at much of the infrastructure that's in place and make the changes that are needed.

We have some opportunities currently that I want to highlight. One is that the Province of Ontario a few years ago put into place the possibility for indigenous institutions to be degree-granting. That is a huge step. It's a positive step. It could be a very important contributing force to making this Indigenous Languages Act work. We have in British Columbia many years of experience in working with every first nations language—34 languages and their dialects. This is complicated work. It requires lots of support from communities, partnerships and collaborations, but it also counts on the kind of research that needs to be done and that right now does not exist. We have some examples.

It's important, then, to look at yourself in government, at how you stop the work, but also look at what people have been doing across this country to keep our languages alive. When you think about all the things that have happened and that have tried to silence us, our languages continue. They continue because of the passion and the commitment you heard from the former speaker, who talked about the commitment from our elders, our knowledge keepers, to protect our languages of the land. We need to be able to use that, learn from it, go forward and work together.

Thank you.

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