Calgary's Identity

Thank you for your wonderful initiative. As a native Calgarian with a great many native Calgarian friends (all of us were born and raised in Calgary), year after year it gets more difficult to hear/read "most of us here now are from elsewhere." Whether this is true or not (I have yet to see the statistics, but I'm gathering it is somewhat accurate), it feels a bit as though the native Calgarian is largely being ignored and discounted - somewhat pushed out by the "newcomers". I have never wanted to leave Calgary, my home, until the last few years when I have begun to feel as though I no longer belong. A conversation many of us had recently centered on this topic and we are not sure what steps we can take to have our voices and identities preserved. I hope Calgary 2012 finds ways to discover and maintain the cherished identity of Calgary as it once was because that identity was the reason so many people were drawn here in the first place. Thank you.