[Witness speaks in Ktunaxa language]
Thank you for having me this morning.
I was just notified on Friday of this invitation, so my presentation is not as polished as the others. However, I will begin.
I wrote an article about TPP promises and the aboriginal peoples in Canada—that was two weeks prior to the election—with uncertainty as to how it was going to go down. I wanted to remind Canada that there are ameliorative measures that need to be taken when it comes to indigenous peoples.
We talk a lot about levelling the playing field and closing the economic gap between indigenous peoples and everyone else. I will mention some statistics.
Indigenous peoples have the highest rate of unemployment in Canada with 14.8% for aboriginal peoples, whereas the national average is 6.3%.
Along with unemployment, the number of indigenous peoples incarcerated in the prison system has risen. The correctional investigator of Canada said that 25.4% of the incarcerated population are now of aboriginal ancestry and that efforts to curb the high numbers don't seem to be working, even though they take background factors into consideration in sentencing. He points to poverty, the history of colonialism, and the lingering effects of residential schools as reasons that so many aboriginal people suffer from alcoholism and other problems that land them in the justice system.
To make matters worse, it's been said that there are more indigenous children in care today than there ever were when residential schools operated. Statistics Canada recently announced that aboriginal children represented 7% of all children in Canada in 2011, yet they accounted for almost half, 48%, of all foster children in the country. In addition, it's been found that foster care predicts higher adult criminality for males first placed during adolescence between the ages of 13 and 18. Chances are that indigenous children that age, especially males, will have a higher possibility of criminal charges and ultimately prison sentences.
The problem of over-representation in the prison system and foster care is endemic to policies that work to destroy the fabric of indigenous peoples. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and Justice Murray Sinclair made a finding of cultural genocide with the following:
Residential schooling was only a part of the colonization of Aboriginal peoples. The policy of colonization suppressed Aboriginal culture and languages, disrupted...government, destroyed Aboriginal economies, and confined Aboriginal people to marginal and often unproductive land. When that policy resulted in hunger, disease, and poverty, the federal government failed to meet its obligations to Aboriginal people. That policy was dedicated to eliminating Aboriginal peoples as distinct political and cultural entities and must be described for what it was: a policy of cultural genocide.
This is not the vision our ancestors had in mind when the treaties were negotiated, or promised to be negotiated. There were promises of reconciliation made in the 19th century where the chiefs had received royal staffs or medallions with the notion that the crown would do them right. As required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763, they created a 1910 document from the chiefs in B.C. and handed it to Sir Wilfrid Laurier. That document talked about the history of colonization in British Columbia and promises that had been made by the fur traders in the North West and Hudson's Bay companies.
When the British occupied the land in B.C. in 1858, they brought with them a different attitude than those at the time of first contact. In B.C., they basically stopped negotiating treaties. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 required that the land that was unceded belonged to the indigenous peoples and that a treaty needed to be made. In B.C. there are very few treaties. The B.C. treaty process is pretty much a failed process. Indigenous peoples have to borrow funds to negotiate, and the tribes out here are having difficult times proceeding with that.
The findings in the St. Catharines Milling and Lumber case, when it went from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Privy Council in England, said that unceded land is basically under item 24 of section 91. It's land that's reserved for the Indians. British Columbia doesn't have the right to enter into an agreement that would impact the land.
When we talk about unceded land, such land also requires the consent of the indigenous peoples under the provisions of the Indian Act, because section 36 of the Indian Act provides that any land that was reserved, whether it's recognized or not, falls under the surrender mechanisms of the Indian Act.