Again, echoing Mr. Edwards' comments about the cultural impacts, our food is part of our culture. The way we collect food, the way we gather it, the way we celebrate—everything that we do depends on the food that we can gather. If we think about, as indigenous people, everything that we've lost in the last 150 years, there's very little that we have left to hold onto to secure and know what our identity is.
As indigenous people, our language, our land and our culture and traditions are all that we have, and a big part of that is food gathering and food security, and the main source of that food gathering comes from the ocean.
There are so many different kinds of food that we normally would gather on a regular basis for all of our different kinds of events that we've done, and for our daily lives. As a child, I did that with my grandparents. I went out and did food gathering with them throughout our swiya—all kinds of food gathering. That was part of who we were in trying to ensure that we had enough food to take us through the winter.
As a young mother, I did the same thing. We live right in the inlet, and, unfortunately, I can look out my window and see all the derelict boats. I can no longer swim in front of my house; there's a beautiful ocean there, but I can't swim there. It's contaminated by all of the boats that are there. I can't gather any food there any longer.
My son knows that I love cockles; we go digging cockles throughout the swiya. He decided one day he was going to go in front of our house and do that, and he brought me a big bucket of cockles. He brought it into the house, and he wanted to cook it. “Let's clean it, Mom; let's cook it and let's eat it together.” I said, “We can't; it's contaminated.” We had to go walk it back out to the ocean and throw it back in the ocean.
How do I explain to my 10-year-old son that we can't gather food? We have to go to other places. We have to go far up the inlet to try to gather some of our food to bring it down. It's very difficult, and not just for our elders who don't have access to the food that they ate on a daily basis. We don't have access to that any further. The risk is huge for us that our children and grandchildren and my great-grandchildren are not going to have that opportunity or know what that is.
We're very concerned and we're very upset. We want to work on it, and we have been doing what we can. We've taken some of the boats out at our own cost because we were concerned about them. The impact is huge; we don't have the time, we don't have the staff and we don't have the funding to be able to address that to begin to restore all of those areas, so it is very difficult.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.