When there are only a handful of fluent language speakers left alive in your community, and your language is your access to your culture, your identity, your values, (everything that was forcibly and violently and unfairly stripped from you), and those language speakers are all over 70, and the ones most likely to die from this disease, every death from COVID19 in a First Nations community is like having an entire museum or cultural institution burn to the ground. The stakes are so high.
So please be understanding and supportive of the initiatives being put into place to protect community members from the spread of COVID19. Isolation, for some First Nations communities in our region, has been one of the hurdles they’ve add to manage, restricting access to jobs, services, stores – a lot of the benefits most of us take for granted. Now, it also could be a protective factor for them. Let’s not take that away, with our desires to recreate, go boating, get out on the lake.
