I'm one of the younger ones up here, and sometimes I get impatient with the speed of change within our own organization and with the things we want to do. I'm reminded by the elders we work with that it has been a really short time that aboriginal people in this country have had relative freedom. This isn't really the forum, but it relates directly to poverty.
I'm the first person in my family to go to university, and that was not seen as a good thing. That was a bad thing. I was leaving the community and I was going to school. What was I, a snob? Wasn't where we lived good? I guarantee you that my child will have a different expectation for education.
So irrespective of what programs come up, what our broad aboriginal agenda is, once we determine what that is, it needs to include access for people to go to school to change the poverty cycles we live in today. Poverty is real. We face it everyday in friendship centres. Soup kitchens and food banks are unfortunately our most well-attended programs. I think it really is symptomatic of a broader dysfunction that we need to heal, but for me, education is probably the gold key for that.