Editor:
I totally agree with Liz Neil’s letter (“Names make us richer,” June 5). First Nation names can enrich our lives on the Sunshine Coast if we learn to recognize the history from “time immemorial” as all of our history. I experienced learning an indigenous language in Okinawa. Okinawa is one of the places where indigenous people live in southern Japan and they are losing their language. A local community centre offered a free indigenous language course for anyone willing to learn, and I jumped into it when I was travelling there.
I wonder if one of the indigenous communities on the Sunshine Coast could offer a class for their language. It would make it possible for us to read the road signs freely and create opportunities to use the language in everyday living. It could also provide us with many different kinds of information in their language too. It would be wonderful if we could listen to and read their beautiful stories that were told from generation to generation in their language. I would be very proud to be one of the residents of the Sunshine Coast if we all became bilingual, and most of all, it’s COOL.
Yoko Oikawa, Gibsons
