Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll direct my first question to Chief Sidney Peters.
Kwe. Weliegsitpu’g.
It's really good to see you this morning, Chief Peters, even virtually. Thank you for joining us at INAN.
Chief, you said something important there, and I want to pick up on it a bit. In your answer, you said that we should be the ones who choose who are and who aren't members of our community. As you know, for more than 10 years the Mi'kmaq have been trying to figure out who the beneficiaries of our rights should be.
You know that I was your Mi'kmaq citizenship coordinator for more than four years, going to communities and talking about what it is to be Mi'kmaq, what it is to belong and what it is around the identity, and a lot of the conversation that I heard wasn't just about ancestry; it was about belonging to a community. It was about connection to a community. It was about knowing who people's families are. In the Mi'kmaq language, we call that Tan Wetipeksin, which means, “Where are your roots?” An elder would sometimes ask you, if you're coming to their community, “Tan Wetipeksin?” They're asking you not just where you're from and which community you were raised in, but who your family is and all of these things.
When we look at this whole idea of the second generation cut-off, I fully agree, from a life of work, that this is overly restrictive and that it should be the communities that decide, but I'm wondering two things.
First, should we be looking only at ancestry when we have these conversations about being Mi'kmaq and belonging to a community to have status? The second question is, where have we gotten to in terms of what it means to be a beneficiary of the Mi'kmaq nation, which we've been working on for more than 10 years?
I submitted a draft document, and I know that your niece, Zabrina Whitman, also worked on this with great enthusiasm. I'm wondering if you could tell us where the Mi'kmaq have landed in terms of some of the important things that we look at when we're talking about who we are.