Thank you very much for the question. I appreciate it.
I should tell you that I lived in Barrie for eight years and commuted to Toronto, so I'm familiar with the many Huron and Wendat remains being found in the Lake Simcoe area.
If we're not going to reset the relationship, then let's go to counselling. Maybe we'll start there and find a way to stop our past behaviours, and then go on to better behaviours moving forward. I think that's the intention.
There are many different players engaged with outreach to Canadians and engaged in this kind of cultural sharing. Again, a very important one—in the purview of this department—is the friendship centre movement. The National Association of Friendship Centres has been with you since 1972, when your Secretary of State.... That relationship has been maintained all the way through to today; I saw that their executive director came before you earlier.
There are friendship centres in Barrie and Toronto and organizations out there that do this kind of outreach. Are they resourced enough to do it all? They would probably tell you they're not, but they can make that pitch to you. I think it's just as important that they reach out to you as well, or to your school boards, to engage in more of an ongoing basis. There's a tremendous powwow in Toronto and all the school kids go down to participate and see active and live cultures. That's an important kind of contribution.
I think there are many partners who can participate as part of this awakening we're having in this country about the relationship. The apology and all of this residential school disclosure stuff is helping, and people are asking more questions and reaching out a bit more.
We haven't talked about our shared history with respect to those older peoples. My community is Curve Lake, Ontario. We have petroglyphs, which are drawings that were made, and we have serpent mounds and burial mounds in the shape of snakes. We have no idea why they're there. We were just told that the old people did it. We believe that the same old people were in St. Louis: these mounds were also built there and the same kinds of societies were developed. So there's a lot of history that we need to explore and understand together, and it's work that we can do together moving forward.
I got a bit off track here, but I think the idea of how we engage with each other with respect to recognizing our past is important.
There's one other thing I'll mention, if I can have a quick minute. I don't think we should be ashamed. Earlier, someone said we were going to be ashamed of our past at the 150th, but I think we should be proud of how we're going to move going forward. That's how I think we should look at it. Yes, we can acknowledge that past, but let's be proud of how we're going to behave moving forward. I think that's something we can do together. That's just another context I wanted to raise.