With respect to the question around funding, it's a crazy, huge issue. I want to ask another one of my partners to address that.
With respect to the historical and contemporary manifestations of colonization, I want to reference a study that was done by Drs. Chandler and Lalonde, two sociology professors from the University of British Columbia. They were puzzled about the incidence of first nation suicide rates in first nation communities in British Columbia. The puzzling question was that some suicide rates in some first nation communities were 800 times the national average. This is shocking. In some communities suicide was virtually unknown.
They carried out a study to find the factors and elements in determining what caused such a gap in the suicide rates. They found what they termed “cultural continuity”. Essentially, the control the communities had over themselves was what made the difference. If they were in decision-making powerful positions, and women-led,—and this is another piece of it that I really need to throw out here—communities that recognized women and actualized the leadership of women were those communities that had those protective factors that made a community safe and functioning.
How do you extrapolate that learning from our contemporary situation in Winnipeg? If you were to look at where your dollars are going, I would suggest they are going primarily into non-indigenous communities to help aboriginal people. That's the kind of scenario that we need to start adjusting a little bit to make sure there is a principle in terms of determining where dollars are going, not to non-aboriginal organizations to help aboriginal women. This is because very often I get calls from those very organizations for me to come and help them because they don't know how to implement their programs because women won't go to those programs. I've actually stopped doing that.
It's not that I don't want to help our women, but that scenario is inherent in how the funding goes. Everybody is able to submit proposals for funding. We really need to redistribute in all kinds of ways.
In terms of the federal government, we need to redistribute the funds to indigenous communities. We know there are very large levels of stereotypes that aboriginal people are all rolling in dollars. We know that's not the case. The dollars that are allocated to indigenous people, very few of them actually get to indigenous communities.
In my mind, the first principle of decolonization would be to look at who's being funded. In my mind, it's kind of easy, but maybe I'm being naive here.
In terms of stranger violence, you know and I know that we can find women prostituting themselves on the streets of Winnipeg. I think it's a part of our culture to not look at ourselves and how the culture works to keep these young people on the streets, but to blame the young people for actually being there. If you keep people in profound levels of economic depression, political marginalization, and social isolation, these are causes that will happen in any community.
Finally, we know that as soon as newcomers come to indigenous territories, they see who the most vulnerable people are. Unfortunately, they exploit our children. We know this is happening. There is a cultural normative or something; I'm not articulating it well. We are.... And it's transferred almost in your pores. You know when you set foot in this country who are the people who are most marginalized, and they've exploited that. We've had children.... We just recently lost to suicide another child who was part of a group of men who used them for sex and drugs. Another one of those young women was found dead at the outskirts of Winnipeg last year. Another one of those young women was found dead in a little community outside of Winnipeg last winter.
We don't have value. We are dehumanized by the culture. That reaps...then that causes the violence against us. If you are so dehumanized as a human being that you are “less than”, then that's.... Then the other piece of it is--