I think President Froh and Vice-President LeClair have said very eloquently what it means to be Métis.
We are a distinct people. We have our own culture, our own language and our own governance structure. We have all of those things. One thing we haven't talked about is our humour; we have that, too. We were talking about it earlier today. We are funny people and we enjoy that.
When we think about forgotten people.... A couple of years ago I was taking a citizenship application in the region 2 office where I worked. The lady sitting across the table from me showed me her family tree. Her family tree listed my great-great-grandfather. She was denied her culture because a settler who married her great-great-grandmother told her that she couldn't tell her family; she couldn't be Métis anymore.
We cried about it in that office because she was my cousin and she had no idea where she came from. She had no idea that her family fought at the Battle of Batoche. She had no idea that my grandmother, who would have been an aunt of hers, was born under a Red River cart on a buffalo hunt in southern Saskatchewan.
These are the things Bill C-53 is about, as Vice-President LeClair said. It's about preserving our language and our culture so that our children and our grandchildren will know who they are. That's what it's about.