The one thing we've always fought for was that there needed to be prevention funding, because what we're really talking about is the healing and the reconnecting and the opportunity for our own governance and jurisdiction over our children and families. Because of the colonial disruption and the number of children who were removed from our communities and our homes, we need to have that prevention and the healing, and we also need the funding to be able to work on our nations' governance for our children and families.
When I was talking with our local delegated agency, we did have strategy sessions and we did talk about the time the lights went out, and everybody was really sad. I told them not to be sad because there was still the huge prevention piece to work on. It's not displacing the work. Your work will shift not from removing the children from families and children in care, it's going to shift to the healing and prevention piece, the culture, bringing the children home, the language, reconnecting with families. That is going to take time because this business of colonialism impacted our communities for hundreds of years, eradicated some and assimilated many. It's going to take many more years to rebuild our nations and provide homes for our children and reconnect them with their language and their culture.