Let me just start right in there again.
Listen, I think one of the problems in Canada and probably in most of the world is that when it comes to education, the textbooks that have been used for many years have been racist. When my mother, father and I moved to Nova Scotia from Australia back in 1968, my mom was supposed to teach history and said to her class that she was going to show them where the history books belonged. Clunk, she threw them into the garbage cans at the front of the class and said, “I refuse to teach you because these are racist to the black community and to our first nations people. It's not true what they're teaching.” My father taught at a teacher's college in Truro and there were no Mi'kmaq teachers in Nova Scotia. So he and Noel Knockwood and Bernie Francis, two incredible Mi'kmaq gentlemen from Nova Scotia, got together and put a program together called the Micmac teacher education program. This was in the early seventies and they trained Mi'kmaq students to become teachers and graduated 13 teachers. Now some government of the day eliminated that program afterwards. I think this is part of the problem: there are not enough indigenous people and first nation people in the system, and a lot of the history that Canadians have been learning is false.
I would say this has contributed to the racism in this country. I would just like to know what any of you might think about this and if you think this has contributed to racism, and what we can do to change things.