Thank you, and good morning.
My name is Sherry Small. My Nisga'a name is Anslutiksgah, having spiritual and moral worth.
As you heard, I am originally Nisga'a, born and raised there. I chose to live in a city. I am married to a black man from the United States, so I know what unity really means. I was raised with it and I live with it.
First of all, thank you for the invitation, which I got on Friday afternoon. So I come to you just as I look, with absolutely nothing other than a few scratchy notes here.
What I find at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre is, number one, why does the urban aboriginal community exist? It is because of colonization. What did colonization do? It created poverty among the aboriginal people. How? It was because of the segregation of families, as you heard the former speakers talk about. Poverty does not necessarily mean just financial poverty. Also, due to the Indian Act, we are segregated from families, and many people at the urban aboriginal Vancouver centre are not there by choice. They are there because of the various types of disenfranchisement. If they were to return home, if they were eligible, they would not be able to fit in, because the segregation has been too long. Number one, people don't know them as closely as they should; number two, the land base is too small. Another thing is the fact that we grew up where we were taught how to live with the land, which means it had a lot of natural resources to live off. We were not chosen to live on the land, where we take from the land and not live with it, so our resources are very limited.
What we find at the friendship centre is we have a day care, we have sports and recreation, we have cultural activities where we allow people to practise eastern-style song, dance, and drumming and western-style song, dance, and drumming, on different nights. There is AA and Narcotics Anonymous. We have mental health advocates, where we as caregivers teach them how to advocate for themselves. We have the urban aboriginal representative who works this job on the side of their desk, because it is legislated in the province that child and family services have an urban aboriginal representative. This means that if you are of aboriginal descent but do not fit under the Indian Act--as defined by the Indian Act as Indian--and therefore are not affiliated with a band, you no longer exist anywhere. So urban aboriginal representatives are aboriginal people, by blood, but with no homeland base, with children in care, with all the luggage that comes with that.
As well, we have an urban aboriginal shelter, which we run very differently. We are very fortunate to have received an extension on this. We do not treat that as a homeless shelter. We allow our workers to assist in getting ready for their guests. We give dignity and respect with all the services that we provide. In the last three years it has worked absolutely wonderfully, but one thing we don't have is money. So we scrimp, scrap, and save as much as we can. In that area we do have poverty.
The urban aboriginal population is closing the gap between being part of the economy, but we are still behind—no doubt the statistics are right in your face—in education, employment, housing, child care, and health care, specifically mental health care. We are slowly changing, but as we get successful our money gets pulled back, and we have no money to operate in the way we would love to operate. That's what makes our programs and services unique. We build our programs and services based first and foremost on the philosophies and values of aboriginal people.
With that, I would like to say thank you very much for your time and thank you for listening. I hope you got a different definition of poverty.