Yes, and we'll get Leon going here.
Greetings from Treaty 4 territory.
I had an elder lift the pipe this morning for all of our work, and I usually say thank you for the prayer. In your system, you don't acknowledge that, but we did that on our own behalf in our area.
I thank all the speakers, and I greet the chief, the leadership, the MPs who are there, the committee.
Community enforcement is a big challenge right now in our area. There are a lot of poor RCMP relations. The community is dealing with an influx of crystal meth, so drug dealing—drug selling and drug buying—is basically at an all-time high. There are so many new things that communities, elders and people are not used to dealing with. Young children are walking around and waving their arms in the air, basically in a zombie state. They have scabs all over their faces. We try to walk around to go visit, but in our situation, we have shootings in broad daylight. It's not been a good situation.
In terms of enforcement, there's a gap right now between the community and law enforcement. One of the biggest problems we're dealing with in terms of law enforcement is high turnover. The community just gets adjusted to some officers, and then, boom, they're gone. They're always re-establishing relationships with the RCMP.
In some cases, there's poor response time and poor community relations.
The prosecution piece in the Indian Act is a big challenge. The BCRs from chief and council of the four communities are being laughed at because the people know that nothing can be done.
We're working hard to come up with our own solutions. We're not here to point fingers and say that you need to do this or you need to do that. What we ask for is respect and understanding of what our solutions are, because there's not one solution for all 600-and-some first nations in the country.
There's flexibility. There needs to be adaptability, flexibility, and understanding and recognition of who we are as first nations and first peoples of this land. We need to design, control and operate the enforcement function.
It's 2021. We don't need people coming into Muskowekwan, Kawacatoose, Day Star and Gordon and telling us how to run our affairs. The solutions are with us. On our end, we're working on getting well, getting healthy, getting back to culture and language and back to tradition.
These are some comments from me.
Thank you.
Leon, I'll turn it to you.