Really, what we need to do is get people talking our language in our homes. My mother was a fluent speaker with a huge amount of knowledge of our history, but she never taught me. She went to residential schools as a child, so I'm not sure if they took the spirit out of her, but she's gone now and I'll never know.

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'The Water Was Our Highway' is the name of my presentation, but we've got to get rid of the past tense. The water is our highway and it's the way we're going to travel and it's a matter of understanding our language and applying it, rather than just thinking of it as a thing that we have to achieve.

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