My community is actually an hour and a half from the nearest city. It's two and a half hours if we go north. It's very hard for community members to access even something as simple as a blood test. They have to drive for this. It is not easy for them to get out of the community to access things.
One of the things that we really learned during COVID was that we had very limited access to health services. We didn't even have access to isolation units. We couldn't take those who had COVID out of the family home so that they could isolate while they were sick. They infected an entire family. If you look at family structure on the reserve, you see that two or three different families could be living in one home. That really impacted us.
I think that's one of the things that we do have to bridge sooner rather than later, because if there is another pandemic, we're going to go through the same thing with the military coming out to help. We have to start looking at solutions to different situations like health.
Another thing is mental health services. Once again, they're two hours away. This shouldn't be happening. I'm in a community with four others around it, so it would be really easy to bring in one service that could be accessed by four communities. It doesn't necessarily mean that one community is going to get a health centre. We can all access and share these types of services, even mental health services. I think that's where bridging the gap comes into play, even with economic reconciliation. If we bring in jobs and a certain company, it encompasses the surrounding communities. It's not just available for one like mine; it could be shared. I think these are things that we definitely have to start thinking about.