That's a pretty profound question. It touches on the philosophy behind reconciliation, and it's a hard question.
There's a book that I read a long time ago called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed—maybe you've read it—by Paulo Freire. I read it in university first, but I don't think I fully understood it. I reread it again when I was appointed to this position.
It talks about oppressed people and how it is never going to be the colonizer that has the answers to decolonize; it is really the indigenous peoples themselves. This is what you're touching on and what we're trying to as the colonial partner in the relationship, which is reflect on how we get out of the way so that indigenous people have the power, the self-determination and the tools, which were promised in many different ways, to rebuild community, to rebuild governance and to rebuild, in this case, a measurement of how communities are doing and whether or not the things the federal government would like to measure are the same things that indigenous people want to measure. Lo and behold, we find they are sometimes not the same, that they are not measured in the same way or that they're not even conceptualized in the same way.
When I talk about education, that was such an “aha” moment for me. In western culture, you either graduated or you didn't. There isn't an in-between. When I reflected on the change in the indicator, it's a different philosophy of education, which is that it's ongoing. Sure, we could talk about how long it took someone to graduate, but we can't discount that someone will graduate in the future. Doesn't that make sense? It made sense to me as an indigenous perspective when I heard the measurement that was selected in partnership.
I think that as the colonial partner in the relationship, we have a lot to learn as a country, and I think it will benefit all Canadians.
Thank you for that pretty profound question.