Absolutely. My elders have told me that they're just ecstatic that the federal government would even look at and consider this. It would be great to have it in June, but if September is going to be picked, we're very happy too. It's important that we don't lose focus.
The other thing I want to mention is that in a lot of meetings I have gone to, we take examples from New Zealand. I just came from a housing conference in Vancouver, and they talked about indigenous people and how they work together. Well, we have 58 different indigenous nations here, so it's a little tougher to not “blanket-think”. That's what got us in the mess in the first place: calling us all “Indians”, then “first nations”, and then “aboriginals”—the new relabelling.
It's time that we rise up as nations ourselves in investment of that day. Obviously, you're not going to know what that statutory day is going to look like, because we have never made deep enough commitments to reconciliation to see what it would look like. We can't have fear.
I'm telling you that when I go to the classrooms and talk to the eight- and nine-year-olds, they know more than the teenagers in some cases, and this is even in the provincial schools. I say that even if our adult population doesn't make that paradigm shift, these kids will. They have figured out how—