Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The NWT is a proud territory with 11 official languages, nine of them Aboriginal representing the moral fabric of our culture and self-identity.
As proud as many of us are to declare this statistic to visitors and diplomats, it saddens me to think that not all is well in the world of northern language and culture. Evidently, many of our Aboriginal languages are in decline. Some are even suspected of extinction if we don’t react accordingly.
Somebody must be asking, how is this possible when we pour millions of dollars annually into language and culture programs and services? The answer is not easily rectified with a dollar figure but more riddled with a crisis of governance, saddled with a lack of coordination and plagued with bureaucracy. If this sounds familiar, it should.
As with any attempt to deal with an issue through a myriad of different governments, so too is the complexity of accountability and transparency that is lost in design.
It is not the fault of any one party or agency or government as to why we face an Aboriginal language crisis in the North. We orphaned it years ago to the chagrin of complacency and, sadly, to its own colonialism and demise.
I have said on many occasions, to what rationale do we owe a language or culture to flourish when we have competing strategies such as the Aboriginal Languages Board directives, the Aboriginal Revitalization Languages Board directives, the Aboriginal governments’ five-year language plans, ECE’s 10-year Strategic Framework for Culture and Heritage, an Aboriginal Languages Secretariat accountability plan, the NWT Languages Commissioner monitoring plan and, of course, the recent department’s review of the Aboriginal Languages and Culture-Based Education or ALCB directive?
I have serious concerns about the viability and effectiveness of this recent ALCB directive and note a lack of coordination of all these recent levels of governance. I mean, how on earth is language supposed to survive the smothering blanket of bureaucracy? This is foolishness and it must stop.
I call upon the Minister of Education to look at this serious lack on this coordinated territorial approach to Aboriginal languages and to properly clarify and justify all these various labels of competing governance. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
