Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak.
Since witnessing the afternoon session, I'm just winging it, and I've totally changed my notes because I want to respond to what I believe are some distorted perceptions that the educational sector appears to have. One of them is about the scholarly, rather than literary, material that is used at universities and colleges.
I have been a freelance journalist since 1982, and worked many years as a freelance journalist. I also produced, wrote, and researched a documentary film. All of my life's work has been on social and environmental justice, and the major themes have been in relation to our indigenous peoples, to go to them and listen to their stories at a time when, for many years, they were mostly being ignored by the news media.
I also witnessed the systems in my society, all of which were systemically and culturally racist; and a lot of my writings were to expose those largely invisible types of racism that we need to recognize. I used media literacy as a tool, and I did workshops all over North America, with educators, about how to inform young people about accurate representations of our indigenous peoples.
Now I want to do books on my life's work, some of which would be anthologies.
I've visited all levels of schools to do presentations in classrooms. I can tell you that universities and colleges, as well as other grade levels in high schools, sometimes elementary schools, use journalistic materials. That was overlooked today, but I'm speaking here mostly as a journalist who now wants to use those investigative DNA cells to continue to speak to our cultural history and write books.
I am so upset by the fact that most of my royalties, both as a writer and a filmmaker, have disappeared since 2012, because the fair dealing is totally not fair, which was acknowledged today by some people. Insights were provided to you. The truth is the educational institutions have been relied upon by professional creators like me for a major part of their income in order to still have a livelihood. But this is now disappearing, deteriorating, and threatening what I can earn as I produce books to contribute to cultural history. This also threatens younger generations of cultural producers, and a well-informed society, and a healthy democracy. It's all those layers—