Thank you so much for that opportunity.
If I think of my own family's experience in interfacing with not only the Canadian health system but with NIHB, there is a tremendous number of years of loss of life. Again, when I reflect on what our relationship is supposed to be as a treaty descendant in Treaty No. 6, that's not what it is supposed to be.
In our lifetime we want to see the transformation for the betterment of our children, of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be able to live and thrive and be the best possible human beings, ayisiyiniw, that we are meant to be here together.
It shouldn't take the tremendous amount of advocacy and work to obtain the basic, most foundational provisions of providing care. What we often hear as indigenous physicians from Indigenous Services Canada is that this program is comparable to any other federal program, including the ones that MPs have access to. I would challenge you to switch your program from your extended benefits that you currently have to the one that people who are Inuit and first nations are forced to use, and you can see how quickly the things that you routinely take for granted for your health, for your family's health, are taken away and removed. When you go and access care, the basic humanity that we strive to provide all people, as is in the mission of Health Canada to improve the health of all people within this country, changes suddenly.
I think that when we look at health transformation from an indigenous perspective, we need to rebuild the indigenous health system. We've seen over the past two years with COVID what happens when there's a threat to a health system, how quickly it crumbles, how quickly many of the provincial and territorial health systems were on the verge of collapse, and that's only after two years, let alone from 1885 to 1951 when we couldn't even access our own health system because we couldn't leave the reserve due to the past system, for example.
When we think of things in that perspective, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to rebuild the indigenous health system and support indigenous health healers, medicine people and elders, who when we do this will actually start to see a change in the morbidity and mortality that we have become so used to when we talk about indigenous people and indigenous people's health and the deficits around these.
In my lifetime, that is something I would like to see as someone who is 40 years old, who is one of the non-fluent Cree speakers in our community. In the next 20 years, there's the potential loss of the Cree language. If that happens, we're going to see worse health outcomes than we already have.
I know Dr. Adams talked about upstream health determinants, and language is an important part of that. With upstream health determinants, traditions and culture is an important part of that, and that's what we need to focus our attention on, and that's really what reconciliation is.