I agree 100%.
I have been in this politics game for some time now. I got elected in my early twenties. I sat on council for 10 years before becoming the chief in 2018 and I was acclaimed just this past summer, so I'm relatively young in this game. I have been able to learn and have my boots on the ground throughout this process. I just continue to think that as hard as it is to have a discussion around residential schools and the history of this country in regard to first nations peoples, it's a discussion we need to continue to have no matter how hard it is.
I sat in this Cultivating Safe Spaces training the other day with a young lady from the Syilx nation, Elaine Alec. One of the comments she made really resonated with me. She said that we're getting conditioned to continue to hear those stories about residential schools—a lot of us, anyway—and to hear these horrific stories about the St. Joseph's Mission. We're going through this investigation now. Now I'm conditioned not to react to them. I'm conditioned, it seems, not to cry or show emotion, but I'll be watching a commercial on TV and something will remind me of a story that I heard, positive or negative, and I'll break down and I'll start crying. I think about the hockey rink, for example, and I break down, and it was triggered because the only stories that I ever heard about the St. Joseph's Mission from my dad were about the hockey rink.
In dealing with these different triggers, they vary for people across this country and across our first nations communities, and there's again no one-size-fits-all solution to all these things. What we need to do is to continue to educate the non-indigenous people of this country and keep the discussion at the forefront so that people will continue to be empowered to bring this up and share their stories so that they can heal themselves.
We want to break that generational gap that we're seeing in all of our communities. We want to break that cycle. I'd like to think the cycle is being broken with my three kids and my kid who is going to be born any day. We're due on Saturday. They are going to grow up in an era when their dad was there every single day of their lives, their mom was there every single day of their lives. That luxury is not the same and is not consistent across our communities.
How do we break that gap? How do we break that cycle? Education is going to be the biggest part of that, in my opinion, so that when I talk to the City of Williams Lake's mayor, he understands the history of first nations people and why it is so important for him to stand beside us and hold us up, not only in projects on the ground for economic reconciliation, but also in participating in the ceremonies and the events we're having in the community to show and prove that he's a leader and he's standing beside us and he's being that example.