I will speak to what happened in Kanesatake, because it's very close to me.
When the events after 1990 happened and the land purchases began with the federal government, the 30 years resulted in Kanesatake having its land there but with no land allotment process. These lands were simply taken. We didn't have a land use plan to properly plan out a structured area where we could have social gatherings, our schools would be protected and so on and so forth.
Ultimately, unfortunately, what happened as well is that we have environmental concerns, because there was a dump that was created afterwards.
The result is huge. The impact is huge. These lands, some of them, became unusable because they now have to be remediated due to the environmental impacts that have happened in all this time that went by. Thirty years is a long time. We could have done a lot more, and I think that having a co-operative strategy with Indigenous Services Canada could probably support us so that this does not happen in other first nations.
We're trying to fix that now through the RIRSD table, and we're hoping that we're going to become somewhere where we can have a land allotment process, where we can address those environmental concerns and have those lands usable again for the Mohawks of Kanesatake.
Nia:wen. Thank you.