Thank you very much, Chair.
Good afternoon, colleagues.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I really appreciate their testimony this afternoon and that of the previous witnesses. I think it really underscores the layers of complexity that surround questions of indigenous rights, status and identity in Canada. We have these layers of constitutional, political and judicial structures that seem fairly abstract in many ways. Then we hear personal stories about how these 50,000-foot concepts have affected people's lives in very fundamental ways.
One of our previous witnesses made reference to the Garden River First Nation in northern Ontario, which is a place my family has connections with. My grandmother, who was non-indigenous, had two sisters who both married first nations men. They gained status for themselves and their children as a result of that. We can see how, within a single family tree, you can have non-indigenous people, status Indians and non-status indigenous people. It's within all that complexity that we need to try to make good decisions in order to address the injustices and discrimination of the past.
This leads me to my question. I'll direct this first to Mrs. Price.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
In previous testimony to the Senate, you emphasized that “any amendments to the Indian Act [must be] consistent with the indigenous and human rights affirmed by the UN Declaration and meet the requirement of Free, Prior and Informed Consent.”
I'm wondering if we could explore that a bit—the contradiction that enters in because of the fact that the Indian Act was not, of course, a piece of legislation indigenous peoples consented to. It was imposed on them and affected their family structures and rights in such fundamental ways.
How can we reconcile this different set of principles—needing to address the discrimination that still exists in the Indian Act, and the gender-based discrimination against women from first nations families in particular, while meeting the UN declaration's standard of free, prior and informed consent for any changes to the act that would affect the rights of indigenous peoples?