Good afternoon. Kwei.
My name is Céline Cassivi, and I am the chief of the Gespeg community.
I would like to thank the committee for allowing me to testify today.
Recognition and support from the federal government are essential for communities like ours to achieve self-sufficiency and protect our culture. Today, I would like to share the story of our community, the challenges we have overcome, and our hopes for the future.
Our community has worked for several generations to obtain a reserve. Many chiefs and councils before us devoted years of effort to this without success. Their work paved the way for us to move forward today. Realizing this dream is a great achievement, as it brings to fruition the efforts of those who came before us.
The absence of a reserve for all these years has had profound consequences. Our members have had to disperse far from their ancestral lands to work or access services. This has weakened the transmission of our language, our territories, our traditions and our cultural knowledge.
Access to federal programs and funding has been very limited. Recently, our community had access to only three grant programs, while other communities were eligible for 27 such programs. During the COVID‑19 pandemic, we received very little financial assistance simply because we did not have reserve lands. These difficulties show that the lack of territorial recognition affects our economic, social and cultural development.
Over the past few years, we have been working to prepare for the creation of our reserve. Under the new conditions, we opted for an accelerated process. We submitted an official form and followed a structured work plan. The official response arrived after about 18 months. Creating a reserve in Quebec is a rare event. There had not been one in over 50 years, which shows how important and complex the process is.
The creation of a reserve will enable our community to strengthen cultural and spiritual ties to our territory. It will ensure that our children and grandchildren can grow up surrounded by their culture and language, and access more federal programs and resources to support our social and economic development.
We recommend that the federal government continue to support the reserve creation process with accompanying programs and ensure that all communities without a recognized reserve have equitable access to resources and grants.
Our community is proud of what it has accomplished, but we still have a long way to go. We are sharing this brief so that our voice, our experience and our vision for the future can be heard and understood. We hope that the committee will be able to use this information to support all communities in similar situations.
Thank you for your attention. Wela’lioq.