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

In 2015, when we first started our not-for-profit and in the beginning when we first started kâniyâsihk Culture Camps, we did not have these knowledge keepers, the helpers for our ceremonies. Here, we have kids who are hunting, trapping and fishing—feeding the elders, feeding the community, feeding the schools and the ceremonial holders. This is what kâniyâsihk originated from.

In the beginning, I asked my grandma, and these are the words from my grandma: “Do not exclude the young girls who are wanting to learn. The youth are crying out. They want the youth to come in and teach themselves and they want the elders to come and teach them the teachings from the land.” Then my kokum said, “At that point of that lake is where in the winter they used to settle the nets.” Yes, everything happens at kâniyâsihk Culture Camps. This is where elders used to teach kids to pick berries.

We have been wanting to create our own curriculum in the native way by bringing in the elders and bringing in the creation stories. We have to learn. We have to teach these kids how to hunt and how to trap.

In 2019 there's a little bit of money that's there. This is going to happen now. We call that the centre of excellence. That is our school. Here, we are teaching kids to teach the language. We bring in our elders. The elders are at the forefront of the teachers. Then we have the young girls who are coming in. We have the female elders who come and raise the pipes there. Then we have the youth meals. They come and they are taught how to lift the pipe. These are the teepee teachings.

Here, we also include the sweat lodge and the horse dance. We also include the owl dance. We also include the sun dance. We have the sweat lodges. There is so much to carry, and there is so much that we have to do. The elders are instructing us. They say to take the kids out on the land. That's where the teachings are. This is where our kinship comes from and our relationships with the land and with the sun. We address it as “Grandfather Sun”. Then there are the eagles and the thunder. The thunderbirds give us the rain and the snow. They do all the work for us, these grandfathers. We address the wind as our grandfather. This is where we address kinship. Everyone is interrelated, be it on land, water or air, and we, as humans, are all related. We are all interrelated. These are the teachings from the elders. Even for the four-legged, we are related to them. For the water, we are related to the water beings.

This is our curriculum. It is just like our language. We are visiting, we love each other and we know each other. It's all because we go back to the relations, the relationships, and we respect our kinship. We respect everyone we are related to. This is how we look and this is how we respect the language. That is why we are working really hard for our languages. That's the reason we are so wealthy in terms of languages. We are rich in our languages across Turtle Island. We are very rich.

We have our relations in the four directions of our people. These creation stories that we hear come from four directions, and this is what we offer the Creator. We give thanks to the Creator in terms of our relations coming from four directions, the four colours of man and the four colours of print.

It is a very honourable thing when you take a child out on the land. Land-based teachings are where we want our kids to be in terms of languages. It is the teachings of the elders. It is the direction from the elders in our school system that we take the kids out on the land, especially in the winter and in the summer as well.

Especially in the summer, when we take the kids out on the land, this is where we harvest our plants. This is where we harvest our ceremonial plants and berries. This is where the elders come together with the youth and the children in the summer, when we have our schools in the summer where we have our elders and we have our youth. We enjoy seeing the elders coming out on the land with the youth and with the children, where they are helping and teaching each other about the land, about the berries, about the trees and about the wildlife.

We have seen high suicide rates. It's because they've lost their identity, but now we have to go out and we have to help each other. We have to bring our youth onto and introduce them to the land. This is the good life. Miyo-pimâtisiwin is what we call it in Cree. This is what kâniyâsihk Culture Camps are all about. We put all of our effort into maintaining that school. In terms of operation costs, we have no funding at all while we're working on our curriculum and trying to bring education.

[English]

We went to Maui. We went to the Hawaiians. They have the tourism industry over there. They're employing their indigenous people, who went through these types of systems. We did the research. We went there and we visited them. In the tourism industry, we know how to keep things sacred, and we know the flashy stuff that we can sell to the world. Destination Canada approached us, saying, “Why don't you talk on our behalf and bring the world to Canada?”

When I was over in China, when I was in Europe and when I was in Australia and New Zealand, they wanted to know about the aboriginal people here. What's going on over there? How are they? They want authentic experiences of Canada. They love and want to hear our stories.

In the time of reconciliation, this is the time when I think we need to flourish. We need to show them the boat skills. We need to show them the math, the architecture and the engineering that goes into making a birchbark canoe. We need to show them the food that we have here. They want to taste that.

I said in my opening statement that I thank Canadian Heritage for saying, “We'll take this on,” but we need movement because the elders are passing. There is a really big urgency here, and when we take care of that urgency, when the funding flows a little faster, it's going to benefit our people. It's going to benefit our riding, our province and ultimately Canada.

[Witness speaks in Plains Cree]

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