Thank you.
First of all, thank you for the invite to be here today. I didn't know what kind of meeting I was coming to. Brad pretty much just “voluntold” me where I was going to be, what I was going to be doing and what kinds of choices I was going to help make. I'm always honoured to put in my two cents or my hundred dollars, whatever it may be. Sometimes you have to put your hand up and tell me to be quiet, because I turn into a politician and start talking and talking.
We're talking about housing today. We're in a rural setting. Our community is up to an hour's drive either way to a city setting. To go out and shop for groceries, you really have to plan. When you go grocery shopping, you fill up your gas tank, feed your family on the way out, go shopping and then come back.
Only about half our membership lives in our community. We have a long waiting list for housing, but we've been pretty creative with our micro homes, the one-bedroom homes and the two-bedroom homes. We've been building quite a few of those. Our young people can utilize those homes, proving themselves or building their families. Before that, if anybody got a house, it would have been the big families. They had the big families and they'd get the house regardless, so that was a problem.
A lot of our homes were built in the eighties by CMHC and Indian Affairs. The contractors would come in to build a house and take as many shortcuts as they could in order to make a quick buck in our communities. That is a problem today. We're applying for funds for renovations. Why? Because we have mould in our attics. We have mould in our homes because of poor ventilation, or we're having to restore the outside of our homes because the slope of our homes and our yards isn't very well done. We have to be pretty creative here in Sts'ailes.
We're an independent band. We're an independent tribe. We're not in treaty. We're not in a treaty process, and we don't believe in a treaty process. We believe in a reconciliation agreement that we will be working on some day soon, hopefully, as soon as the pandemic allows us to.
We're going to put the invitation out to our MP Brad Vis, who has already come here a couple of times and has viewed our community, which is a good thing. You can't work with a community unless you know who you're working with. We're going to build that relationship our way. We'll set the table and invite him here. Then we'll talk about business in a good way.
We need to make it [Inaudible--Editor]. In our language, [Inaudible--Editor] means the interconnectedness that we all have together. We all have interconnectedness one way or another, because we're from only one Mother Earth, each and every one of us. We're from one mother. That's what our elders tell us, and that's always our teaching.
I'm glad and I look forward to Brad coming here and working with us. The housing is really important to us. We need a place to call home.
[Inaudible--Editor].
Thank you.