If I could take a crack at answering, I think the entire system is rooted in colonialism. It's not just these departments.
The decolonization of how we interact with indigenous people to select indicators and create a national outcomes-based framework together means changing the way indigenous lives are measured from one that the government is in control of—the government is also the one that reports on that—to returning the control and self-determination to communities. This way, they can measure for themselves how things are going and understand better if the things they're doing, in addition to the inputs from the government, are resulting in outcomes that they see as enhancing the community and benefiting community members.
It's not an easy project, because there is a long-standing tradition in this place—and rightly so—of attaching fiscal accountability to outcomes. However, in my mind, it hasn't been done in a way—including in many of these offices—that fully reflects the autonomy of indigenous peoples and the rights of indigenous peoples to measure for themselves and control for themselves their own data and to determine for themselves what they want to measure.
Anecdotally, when I was preparing for this meeting, I understood that the education outcomes are shifting from graduating on time or graduating outside of the standard time. That's not the way we've talked about it; we've talked about graduation rates, period.
If I think about that, from the conversations I've had as a minister, it makes sense to me, because it isn't only about whether you graduated or not. What communities are asking is if it took longer for an indigenous person to graduate. This reflects the compassion of a community to understand that sometimes it takes longer if you've come from a background of inequity and that those accomplishments should not be discounted.
I think there's some real promise in this, because it is about data reconciliation as well.