I really appreciate it.
I also want to acknowledge your beautiful language and your native tongue. It's a wonderful thing to hear in 2023. I wish all our nations were afforded the same when speaking at these levels.
With that being said, for me, I think the first step is exactly that—recognizing our people. With the declaration itself, if you look at the Declaration of Human Rights when that happened, what happened, and what were the subsequent actions from there? There was the creation of the Human Rights Commission. Then there was the Human Rights Tribunal where you could actually go and make arguments on issues specific to human rights.
Indigenous rights aren't being treated the same. We are being left to fight these things out in these courts where the only real change that we can actually have is all the way up to the Supreme Court, yet human rights are being challenged and recognized, and decisions like what we're seeing today in regard to our children are happening today in real time.
I think there are steps that need to happen. There needs to be an indigenous rights commission that allows for us to have tribunals and to have decisions made that recognize the issues we have here. There are no courts that are supporting that right now. The courts that are being supported right now, or the system that we're involved with right now, we didn't have any involvement in creating it. If we had no involvement in creating that, how are we expecting our issues and our rights to be settled within a structure that was never meant to service our people?
For me, it's a big challenge that, where we are, we've all inherited this. Everyone sitting around this table and everybody online inherited the problem that was created over 200 years ago when it started to recognize the immigration of people into our territory and then the pushing us away and the annihilation of our people.
I think if Canada was to get serious, it would start to look at having opportunities for our people to sit down and to be able to discuss disputes, and to be able to discuss indigenous issues that aren't contrary to law but are focused on the indigenous rights that we have inherently from birth.