Thank you very much, Grand Chief, and my thanks to all of you for inviting us to be witnesses.
I'm Chief Arlen Dumas from the Mathias Colomb First Nation.
I took the liberty of listening to all the other witnesses and presentations given here in front of this committee. I would like to sum up of those comments.
The message we'd like to deliver today is that this intervention policy is a punitive measure. It's all about control and has nothing to do with transparency or accountability. The further the government chooses to go along this line, the more harm it does to the communities from a first nations perspective. I take a look at my community. We are survivors of this intervention policy. It was initiated because of government interference and the government's opposition to the different stances we had taken as a community and as a nation in Manitoba and in Canada.
Because of that, we were reprimanded and subjugated for a decade. With that happening, as a fairly young leader in my community, I can tell you that from the day I was born until 2000 there were never any suicides in my community. We were forced into intervention in 1998, and we had our first community suicide in the year 2000. After that, we had a rash of them.
I was raised in a very opportune time when I was able to go to school and have these wonderful opportunities bestowed upon me. When I left my community, there was a great sense of hope. When I returned home in 2002, you could feel the despair in the air, simply because of this false narrative that we were unable to manage our own affairs. We went from being the beacon in the 1980s and early 1990s to being people who couldn't manage their own affairs, according to a false narrative perpetuated by the governments of the day. Essentially, that's what I'm here to present today, and I'll respond to some questions later.
I feel that in this co-management and intervention, a lot of focus was put upon third parties, but it doesn't a matter, because the second you move into this paradigm, it's a punitive experience. It will dictate whether or not you can complain about your contribution agreement, whether or not you can choose a different financial analyst, or whether you can complain that your population formulas were frozen from 1982.
In 1982, my community's population was 1,000. We're now well over 3,500 members, with the same amount of money. The issue is the chronic underfunding. It's not lack of reporting, transparency, or leadership. The fact is, we're chronically underfunded in all aspects of our community funding. In the time that we were in co-management, we didn't build houses and we weren't able to develop our infrastructure. In fact, the rules and mechanisms that exist within that infrastructure were very punitive to our communities. Once we get out of co-management, we hear that our lift stations have not been maintained for 10 years, that our infrastructure hasn't been maintained for 10 years, and so on and so forth.
It's also how the programs are laid out. We might get $300,000 to work on our housing stock, but then we're told we're not going to get any more money until that's paid off. My resources are already so slim. I ask how I'm going to do this, and they tell me I just can't manage my affairs. That's the reality of the issue.
I'm not sure how much time I have, but I'm looking forward to your questions a little later.