Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you to all the presenters here today.
Regional Chief Adamek, I have a question to you to start off.
I'm non-status adopted Cree from Alberta, my great-grandmother Lucy Brown Eyes, was a full-blooded Cree woman. Everybody thinks my mum is Mexican because she goes out and tans for a half hour to two hours and it's like she's been outside all summer. She's one-quarter Cree.
We didn't talk about residential schools, yet there was one not very far away. We didn't talk about being indigenous because in the seventies in Alberta that was like a thing of shame. I think we have to get to a point in Canada where we actually pause and talk about the dark parts of our past, where we talk about how we marginalized people, and where we talk about how residential schools were copied by the apartheid government of South Africa to figure out how to separate people. We did such a good job separating indigenous people from non-indigenous that other governments actually came and studied us and then used it to oppress their own peoples. I think that's worth a day.
I think for the people who were in residential schools up until the point where I was still in university, in the nineties, at the University of Alberta and people were still going to Blue Quills, that deserves a day. I think that deserves $11 million of federal money to give all the people who are on the federal payroll a day off to go and listen and think about that with their families. Hopefully the provinces and territories will follow suit.
Regional Chief, do you believe non-indigenous Canadians, either southerners or Canadians in the north, know enough about indigenous history and residential schools yet?