Wonderful, thank you so much.
To begin, I send thanks to our member of Parliament, Guillaume Deschênes-Thériault, whose support makes my appearance here today possible.
My name is Chris George, I'm chief of Eel River Bar First Nation. I'm here today to voice the concerns of the nearly 900 community members who I represent.
Policing and public safety are of grave and immediate concern for my community and have been so for multiple generations. The issues we face today are symptoms of deeply rooted issues that conspire to suppress our capacity to defend ourselves effectively. I will use my opening remarks to address some of those issues.
My home community is situated on the north shore of New Brunswick, along Mawipoqtapei—more commonly known as Chaleur Bay—which has been recently identified as the 31st member of the Most Beautiful Bays of the World club. Eel River Bar lies within Gespe’gewa’gi, the seventh district of Mi’kmaq homelands.
Drug trafficking is a primary concern for my community. We lack our own police agency to enforce the bylaws and band council resolutions that my administration uses to address public safety concerns. Most of the perpetrators involved in this drug trafficking are not even community members, they come from outside communities and they use Eel River Bar as a haven for their trade because they know my administration lacks the institutional capacity to take real police actions to disrupt their illegal trade. I argue this lack of institutional capacity is due to the legacy of colonialism.
We have sought help from provincial agencies, but their jurisdiction does not extend to reserve lands. We continue to seek support from the RCMP, but they are not always capable or able to provide the sort of police actions we really need, which has led to a situation wherein the bad guys run the roost, which greatly raises the fears and concerns of our community members.
The violence we contend with daily in my community is symptomatic of deeper issues of structural poverty and institutionalized colonialism that continue to inhibit holistic growth and development for most Mi'kmaq families today. As such, my administration lacks the capacity to do the job of policing and public safety ourselves; we are forced to be dependent on provincial and federal agencies.
Policing and public safety are conceptualized much differently through a Mi'kmaq world view than mainstream Canadian perspectives. Policing for us is more than using force, it includes personal moral values and an inherited responsibility to live in harmony with all of creation.
Effectively confronting the violence and trauma of drug trafficking ultimately requires intergenerational community-led strategic actions aimed at healing the damage caused by forced assimilation and colonization. This also requires financial resources that current funding models cannot accommodate.
The harsh reality is that funding models cannot effectively confront the deeply embedded structural poverty that institutionalized colonialism presents for Mi'kmaq communities today. We need fair and equitable resource revenue-sharing so we have enough resources to make our communities truly safe.
In closing, I would like to acknowledge that 300 years ago, my ancestors, along with other Wabanaki nations, entered a treaty relationship with the English Crown through the 1725 Peace and Friendship Treaties. Those ancestors had a much different vision for their future descendants from the one we exist within today.
I often reflect on the sort of political economy my ancestors would have developed if they had not been so violently invaded, dispossessed and assimilated, and how it would have evolved to operate today, and I wonder if the need for policing and public safety would be so urgent.
We cannot change the past, but we can learn from the mistakes and move forward better informed. Please consider the sort of comprehensive and intergenerational resurgence that can happen if one reconceptualizes current notions of nation-to-nation and treaty relationships.
I ask the committee to take time to read, reflect and discuss among yourselves the arguments laid out in the two red papers published by the Yellowhead Institute entitled “Land Back” and “Cash Back”. Both address the structural poverty and institutionalized colonialism that I alluded to in my remarks today.
Thank you all so much for your attention.
Msit No’kmaq all my relations.