First, I have to disagree with an attempt to frame the residential schools as anything but trying to kill the Indian in the child. I will not ever accept the residential schools for anything outside of that.
I'll stop there to say that what we are doing is giving our young people who are going into education an opportunity. We send our people to school, and in many instances, they're stuck in the cities, and there is not a lot of opportunity in the community. It's simple transfer payments. It's simple government programs that are underfunded, so you're managing poverty, and many of the people are coming to communities. We have addictions. There's no investment happening there, so they're not given the opportunity to work for their people or work for their communities.
That's what our values are all about. They're about coming back and being able to contribute to your community and to the nation at large. We are a collective of Anishinabe people. We have 30 communities that are Anishinabe. We have four communities that are Dakota, so we really focus on the core teachings and core values around that. Much of what we do is collective. We are a collective economic development corporation owned by all of the communities.
In addition to growing the corporation, it's also about building opportunities for recreation. It's all about investing back into our communities, supporting community well-being and looking to how we partner with the communities in order to create more opportunity and build relationships within the private sector to build more opportunity. That is what it's about for us. It's a comprehensive approach because we're trying to look at all opportunities.
It's also about fairness. We've always been fair. The treaty process was fair. The survival of many of the settlers who came here in the early days was dependent on first nations. We were the social contributors. We contributed to the survival of settlers in our territories, so that value system continues today. It's all about fairness, and we've been a part of that.
Equity is about fairness. You can't say that a first nations child born in a first nations community has the same equity as someone born in middle-class Winnipeg. It's just not the same. You're not experiencing the same decades and decades of poverty and all of the other stuff that goes with it. That's what we've been doing in order to bring continuity in terms of our cultural values to economic development.