Thank you.
I want to thank you for that excellent presentation. I also want to tell you that I take great hope in my work, because I see the power of young people in the communities who are speaking up and taking leadership. I'm very confident that the future will be better because of leadership like yours.
What we need to do, however, is address the deep-seated, systemic denials of rights that are still in place. Last night I and my colleague from Thunder Bay saw Gord Downie's incredible performance of the Charlie Wenjack story. It was very moving, but I kept thinking, through that, that Canadians still don't get it. They think the Charlie Wenjack stories are 50 years old, when the Charlie Wenjack stories are happening to this generation of young people who have to leave home at 13 and 14 to go to school.
I thought of Shannen Koostachin. She was 13 when she had to leave Attawapiskat. That's way too young to go to school. She lived with my family, and she was an incredible warrior for education. We were told that her parents had to sign her guardianship over to us to go to school in a provincial system. That was such an attack on the power of the family, but it was just considered perfectly normal by the federal Indian affairs department, by the white school board: “Hey, that's how things are done in 2016.”
I want to ask you, as a youth, about confronting this system that is still very much in place. For all the positive talk, the system of Duncan Campbell Scott and the denial of rights to young people is still very much in place. What will it take for us to start to dismantle this so that education and health and the decision-making of your generation are decided to your benefit?