Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Oct. 19th, 2016

[Will Landon]

One is just being new to this whole thing. I got elected to the Treaty No. 3 youth council by the youth just six months ago, and I just got appointed to the AFN from the OFNYPC in July.

From what I can see from there, it's going to be.... I hate to keep going back to the resource thing, but that is just going to have to be how it is. We don't have the resources to travel everywhere, or to always attend these things, or even to be able to hear our youth so that we bring their voices to you. Again, as youth leaders, we're not specifically working from our own ideas and our own agendas. It's the young people behind us telling us what to tell you, so we need to be able to hear those voices. That's the biggest challenge: to have the resources to host events to hear their voices and make sure that the ideas of our nations are what we're communicating to you.

[Gary Anandasangaree, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge Park, ON]

Thank you, Will, and congratulations on your new role.

[Will Landon]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you.

Our next question is from David Yurdiga, please.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you for being here today. It's an honour for us to hear from the youth. Obviously, the youth are our future, and what we do now will determine the future of the next generation.

I've been going through your handout. Under “Youth Leadership & Wisdom”, you say, “Create meaningful opportunities for youth to take action on issues of importance to them.” Can you expand on types of opportunities this document is referring to?

[Will Landon]

Again, that's going to be about having the ability for our grassroots youth to travel around, to at least open up the doors for them to come to these types of events, conferences, or training sessions in order for them to expand their horizons and to leave the community, and also to empower themselves to, again, expand that leadership mind and to understand where they would fit in this whole advocacy area. That's where that comes from. We need more support in order to make sure these types of things are accessible for them.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Does it refer also to the economic climate? Everything takes money, so the future for youth.... Do they have jobs? What's their future? How important are education and job creation to the youth?

[Will Landon]

It's very important. The way I see it, I have to walk two roads. I have to keep my identity, but I also need to make sure that I'm educated in the current system that we have in order to benefit, to get a job, to hold a job, and to make money to support my family. That's very important for our youth. You see, a lot of suicides can be linked to low economic opportunity. They don't feel there's a lot for them out there. Sitting on welfare is not a great option for them and it gets depressing.

In terms of creating jobs, we are also going to have to invest in infrastructure, because it's tough to even start thinking about developing jobs in a lot of the places in the north like Attawapiskat that are isolated and alone. That's just what I think. It's very important, but it's tough.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

I'm glad you mentioned being trapped between two worlds.

In Iqaluit, a young gentleman said that he's trapped between two worlds. He can't go back, and he cannot move forward. Is this a common sentiment among indigenous youth?

[Will Landon]

It's tough to find balance. A lot of youth will go too much into one world, and they might get lost. I think that's where things like addiction come into play. On our side of things, alcohol, drugs, and all that stuff are not supposed to be abused in that way. That's where I find my strength in terms of staying sober, and things like that. It's why I'm able to function better on the other side of the coin in terms of holding a job, being in places like this, and doing my work. But, yes, I think it's a very common sentiment among the youth.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you for that.

I heard from a lot of witnesses regarding cultural renewal. How is this incorporated into the calls to action?

[Will Landon]

In the call to action number six, in my presentation notes, culturally appropriate, land-based teachings and educational programs are made available for youth and young people, so that's already incorporated.

Call to action number five recommends that support be provided to first nations communities so that elders and cultural advisers can provide cultural teachings that will enable young people to know where they came from and who they are. So that's already incorporated within these calls to action. I hate to say “reclaiming” or “refinding” our identity, because it's who we are. I think it's just most focused on unlocking who we truly are as a people.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

We heard from a lot of people, especially youth, who would like to see more cultural things incorporated into the education system, such as having elders come in. Do you feel that having elders be a part of the education system is very important to this cultural renewal?

[Will Landon]

Yes, and in our public school board we have an aboriginal adviser. I believe a lot of school boards have something like that. I think that even the provincial level needs to start looking at having advisory circles from elders to come together—even just on a school board level—to make sure that the proper programming and the proper services are being provided for our youth in a culturally safe manner.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

What challenges do you face in getting youth to take on leadership roles? What role do mentors play in developing our youth for the future?

[Will Landon]

There's definitely a lot more youth stepping up to the plate in terms of leadership than when I was a young person.

There are some of the challenges out there, as I said. It's tough for a lot of our youth who, because of social media, are very aware of what's going on in our world and within Canada. It's tough for a lot of them to feel that they can make a difference.

I've asked some youth if they might take my position in three years, because that's how long my term is, and they feel that even if they did, they question what they could accomplish. They feel we're still hitting our heads against the wall. There's already such a cynical outlook as to the relationship between our two peoples and our two ways of being. They just feel that they're not going to make a difference.

I think the biggest challenge is to encourage them to realize that the government is going to be open to hearing us and working with us, but again, that's going to have to be demonstrated.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you.

There are so many things that aboriginal and indigenous youth face on an ongoing basis. What measures can the government take to address youth suicide specifically?

[Will Landon]

You're going to have to meet, at the nation-to-nation level, PTOs...unceded territories. You're going to have to meet them and see what their needs are and where you can provide the support. We're already doing the work on the ground with the very few resources we have. We're already taking those roles and steps into healing. Where we're going to need you to come in is to decide where our resources need to be allocated, what needs more support, and things like that.

Again, that's just going to have to be with you guys coming to the nations and asking them and seeing their unique issues and their unique assessments.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thanks.

The next question is from Charlie Angus, please.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

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?

[Will Landon]

That will just have to be our commitment to the long battle. At the end of the day, I think most first nations people want to see the Indian Act taken away, but there's already so much legislation within the education legislation that it makes it very tough. There are a lot of things entrenched, from the Indian Act, into other legislation. It will have to be that long battle in working with people who have experienced this legislation, people who have experienced things like those attacks against the family, to figure out which parts of legislation need to be taken away, need to be chiselled away, in order to start creating that empowerment within our families and within our communities.

That's where I think we have to settle in for the long battle. We have to understand that we're not going to see the end of it in our lifetime, but we can start a process in which maybe two or three generations from now things like that won't be as commonplace.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you. I hope we'll see it in our lifetime, but I think the system has to be dismantled.

I have thousands and thousands of pages of access to information documents to figure out how this system could be as dysfunctional as it is. I have it all back to Duncan Campbell Scott's notes on ripping off the Cree people after signing Treaty No. 9. In all the years, from the 1920s and Duncan Campbell Scott to the Pierre Trudeau government, all the documents right up to today, I've never, ever once seen a bureaucrat say they were really concerned about the children, never once.

Now, they're good people. They do good work. They're soccer moms and soccer dads. But it seems that the system from the beginning was focused on downloading the costs so the feds didn't have to pay—that's what they did in the residential schools and that's what they're still doing in education—limiting liability of government, and negating treaty obligations. The people who are running the education and health systems are not educators. They don't have backgrounds in schooling. So we have a non-system, federally, unlike the provincial systems. In the provincial systems, everything is done for the benefit of the children.

Can we even reform this system? You speak so well about the need to take control of education. How can we reform a non-system as opposed to taking the power away from the bureaucrats who are trying to limit their own responsibilities and liabilities? How do we transform it so that the communities and the families and the parents are in charge of making the decisions about what is best for the well-being of young people?

[Will Landon]

We already see that within the NAN territories where they are beginning to set up their own school board and their own ideas of what education should look like within their areas. There has to be a support system for all PTOs or even just right down to sovereign nations to take that approach.

We have the word inaakonigewin in our language; that's like law. We have to be able to support these communities to come up with their own education or inaakonigewin, making sure that's the part that's being respected so that we have a framework to be able to point to and say this is exactly what we want and what we need. I think the government can help that by making sure we have the resources to hire the experts and the technicians and making sure our elders are included in establishing such a framework.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I want to go back to the issue of education in terms of accountability nation to nation. I don't know what nation to nation means all that much except it must mean being truthful. In terms of education, in terms of health care, the documents are always impossible to find. How much is actually being spent on the health continuum, $350,000? What's the rest? Where is it going? I don't know. We're always plunged down rabbit holes with the departments.

If we're going to have a nation-to-nation relationship—and I encourage you as a youth leader with the AFN to call for this—we need to have the books of Health Canada opened so we know how the decisions are being made and why they're being made.

I would like to ask you, in terms of your experience with other youth out there, about youth stepping up. I see the articulate and confident nature that you have. I see it in the NAN youth council, and I see it in the other youth leaders. You're actually saying that you don't want to come here anymore just to be heard, and then we make our report. You want to be part of the decision-making because it's about your life. Do you see a way that we could do that?