[Witness spoke in Hul'q'umin'um']
Hello. My name is Joan Brown, from Snuneymuxw First Nation. I'm very humbled and honoured to join this sacred circle to talk about such an important topic.
Institutions claim that indigenous people are a vulnerable people, but we are not inherently vulnerable. We are only vulnerable people because of the multiple man-made industrial stresses that our vulnerable land has been subjected to. We know that the stresses on the environment do not stop at our communities. These stresses know no boundaries.
We are seeing increased rates of cancer and chronic disease in our families. When we look around our neighbourhoods, we see the many economic drivers of the environmental stresses, including historic coal mines, industrial ports, logging, pulp mills, tanker traffic, farming operations, air traffic and waste management. Our question remains, what happens when all these toxins merge onto each other? What is the cumulative impact?
These man-made stresses have interrupted our way of being. Food security, clean water and access to medicines and seafood are all critical to our wellness and ceremonial way of life. We are experiencing the impacts, including increased morbidity and cancer rates. We know that within a single neighbourhood, 25% of our residents have either died of or are living with cancer.
We know that the world is made up of vital connections of profound interconnectedness. The existing, mainstream, siloed approach used to address vulnerable lands does not work. We need to investigate the cumulative impacts with a balanced approach whereby an indigenous and a scientific approach walk hand in hand.
We know that this work is generational, but we can't knowingly sacrifice a generation while we begin this investigation. There is important work, and there is urgent work.
Snuneymuxw chief and council and our elders have deemed this work to be urgent. Because we have forgotten how to hear the voice of the land, the land is showing her sickness in the form of cancer and disease throughout our community. We understand that she is on her last breath.
Since the beginning of time, the old people learned from the land and understood how to work together with the land and with each other in the face of the harsh natural terrain. Today the landscape is harsh, but it is man-made: poverty, addiction, family violence and the climate crisis. Now, more than ever, we need to remove the false boundaries and work together, or we won't survive.