This has been absolutely fascinating. I'm not going to repeat the questions that have really laid out what it's like on the ground. We've heard it very clearly.
Ms. Greenwood, I was really struck by your comments about the effects where you have communities that are self-determining. The very first time I flew into Kashechewan, a woman came up to me and asked, “How would you like to raise your child in a prisoner of war camp?” I looked around, and suddenly I saw it in a different light.
I mention that because Allan Teramura, the president of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, called me. He wanted to come to Kashechewan because his mother was raised in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. She had seen a picture of Kashechewan and said, “That's where I grew up”.
We toured Kashechewan, and what he pointed out as an architecture specialist was that there was absolutely nothing in the community that allows the community to make its own decisions. This is a holding camp that was designed as a holding camp. When they signed Treaty 9, they put everybody in holding camps. Everything, from the architecture, to the community layout, to the decisions, and to the education, is decided by bureaucrats in Ottawa. Businesses that try to get off the ground are decided by bureaucrats in Ottawa.
So you have communities that have no ability for the leaders and adults to take control. It's all on the whim of someone, at someone's desk someplace. That sense of hopelessness is something we don't often think about.
Then you add the trauma of the residential schools, the trauma of the poverty, and the black mould in the houses, but there's the overall psychological damage of treating these communities as though they're holding camps.
I would like to ask what you meant in terms of the idea of communities having good health outcomes and the ability to be self-determining.