[Witness speaks in Mohawk]
I greet you in my language and acknowledge all the natural life forces that allow us to be here today, including mother earth.
I've been listening to people talk about the legalities of it, and I'm here to tell you a bit about what it's like to live in a community where there's fighting over who's more Indian than the other person. We as indigenous people are regulating Canada's dysfunction, Canada's refusal to repudiate the doctrines of superiority that have allowed Canada to tell us and define for us who is going to be an Indian under the Indian Act. You come to us and you expect us to give you the answer. Well, the answer is self-determination; not self-government, but self-determination.
I agree with everything that has been said today. Indigenous women have experienced double discrimination, first for being indigenous, and then for being women.
I find that a lot of the semantics that are being used in the propaganda to sway people to think that they are getting any kind of entitlement by having status belie the dispossession that we experience as indigenous people. We are entitled to this; it's something that our ancestors gave us. We're entitled to this from the colonizer.
We're going to be rebuilding our nations, and just as the Indian residential schools apology acknowledged those who survived the genocide, Canada needs to acknowledge further and more deeply the damages and threats to our languages and culture and the criminalizing of our traditional forms of governance. Our traditional forms of governance need to re-emerge, and we need to be part of a true partnership as a nation, and not “consultants”, because we are always considered minorities. We are not minorities. We are peoples with self-determining rights, and as such we will determine who will be our citizen.
As far as forced assimilation goes, as Mary said, under article 8 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture. Yet that is exactly what is going on with Canada and its laws. As Mary said, 1985 was exactly when we started getting some movement on this, but Canada has been hesitant because of the cost. In our communities, we are being further dispossessed, because it is always the public interest and not the interest of indigenous peoples' human rights that goes first.
We are the first to experience climate change. We are the first to have less than what the ordinary Canadian considers.... As former auditor general Sheila Fraser said many years ago, it would take 28 years for in-community schools to catch up with the rest of the schools and the rest of Canada. Imagine that: children and schools are going to be set aside. That is the kind of portrait that I want you to see so you can see what you are going to be making decisions about.
We need to have the emergence and the ability to recover from the genocide that our ancestors recovered from. Canada must repair the harm that it has done to indigenous nations. Why do we always have to take up residency on reserves, these small postage-stamp sized communities that the Government of Canada has allowed us to live on out of the good graces of its heart, and yet it can appropriate the land anytime it feels like it?
I find it really difficult to be here and to talk about gender equality, because I do believe in it. I wholeheartedly believe in gender equality, but there must be some reconciliation and restitution. There must be a human rights-based approach. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a good way to go about it. Universal, interdependent, indivisible—that's what human rights are about. It's not about the economics of it. Canada needs to stop making us its industry to make employees and to create jobs, because a lot of our budget goes to the bureaucracy that's in the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.
The consultations are totally inadequate. You have to have real consultations if we are going to profoundly address this issue of gender equality, and we have to put aside the question of what it's going to cost Canada, because it's now costing us. It's costing us threats to our language, threats to our culture, threats to our land, the environment....
I find it really difficult to hear about the Prime Minister of Canada saying that indigenous people are the most important relationship he has when I see what is going on with the environment, with the pipelines, and when I see the fact that my community, which suffered military occupation and paramilitary forces 26 years ago, is still struggling with the same land issues as back then. Ours is the oldest issue. For 300 years it's being going on.
We need to stop looking at the cost and start looking at the traditional customs. We need access to our trust fund that was developed for us. That's where our money for services comes from.
You know, when Canada decides to accept someone as a citizen, that citizen has to study about the country, speak the language, and understand the culture. That doesn't happen when it comes to Indian status. Indian status is given out like bingo cards. What we want, if those people come back, is that they also learn their language and learn their culture. It's not about going to the SAQ and buying bottles of wine without paying taxes. It's about something more profound than that. It is about being onkwehonwe, the real human beings that my ancestors talked about. It's about loving the land, loving the environment, and thinking seven generations ahead. That's what this should be about.
I thank you for your time.
I mean no disrespect to anybody. I hope my words did not offend anyone.
Niawen ko:wa.