Thank you, Mrs. Gill.
I am here as a private citizen, and I completely agree with what these great Anishinabe women are saying. I'm not a politician, I don't work in Parliament and I always wonder whether the government wants to follow the original intent of the Indian Act.
Does it intend to continue the genocide of our first nations?
I'm not a politician or a strategist, but I always wonder whether the government wants to continue on the same path. Since 1985, we've been losing people. We have said it at length at other times in our presentation: There is a difference between membership, where our nations decide who belongs, and the Indian register.
Personally, I think it's important to keep a register of people who are excluded. To take the example of my great-grandmother, it was very hard to prove, because Indian status didn't exist at the time. There was no list of all the women who were removed. If we continue to exclude people from the register, there has to be some kind of register to keep a record of those people.