Thank you for coming today.
I'm Ontario's only first nation member of Parliament and a member of Treaty No. 3 territory, which you referenced. I actually worked for the organization as the executive director. It seems like a million years ago, but it was a while ago, and I know about the problem with government funding and the way in which organizations and communities are funded.
You spoke about long-term solutions to solve the problem. Right now, I see it as first nations people and indigenous people across this country having been put in a place of dependency through the Indian Act. The Indian Act was good at what it did; it made our people very dependent on someone else. That needs to stop.
I'm not deflecting the responsibility of the federal government and the provincial governments right now to resolve the problem as it exists. We're in crisis mode. You've referenced the unacceptable suicides that are happening right across the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, northern Ontario, northern Saskatchewan, and right through all of our first nation communities across the country. This is deplorable, and it needs to be stopped.
Over and over again while we've been working as a committee on the study, we've heard about some of the things that you've referenced. One is that youth centres are very helpful in giving indigenous youth some meaning, starting from a very young age, and that goes a long way to preventing these tragedies from occurring.
I'm somewhat familiar with your organization. Again, in the long run, I see indigenous communities and first nation communities across this country building programs to help ourselves, to help our own people. I understand that there is not a lot of capacity in some communities.
My vision in terms of first nations communities would be that we would have our own revenue, perhaps through agreements with the provinces and the federal government on sharing natural resources, so that we don't have to be—I'm careful when I say this, because I think some people misinterpret it sometimes—beggars in our own land.
Throughout history, we've signed treaties and agreements to share this land, and that's not what has been happening. Our land has been taken and we've been marginalized. We've been placed on small patches of land called “reserves”, which are usually scrub land, and then given money from these governments and told how to run our programs and our communities.
That's for the long term. It needs to change. I don't have all the answers for how it's going to change. It's going to have to come from the individual communities across this large land.
My question for NWAC is, what has your organization been doing in the short term to partner with community groups and other organizations to deal with this crisis immediately? What support can the federal government give to your organization and to other organizations that are helping with the immediate crisis?