I just want to talk very briefly about the work the Grandmothers Protecting our Children are doing. It's been a voluntary commitment of love by a group of women.
About four years ago, there was a newspaper article about an elder from a northern Manitoba community who was incarcerated at the time for incest on his granddaughter. At that time he was before a parole board, and the community significantly got behind him to have him released back into the community. It was successful. At the same time, they banished the young woman from the community. He came back home to his first nations community and reoffended on another granddaughter.
At the time, this was making the front pages. Anything that has to do negatively with indigenous people always ends up at least on the front page, so this obviously was one of those things that was on the front page.
At that time, a group of grandmothers and women got together and said this is just enough. We were going to assert our indigenous women's leadership once more, because before, in the past, that was very much at play in our communities. No decisions would have been made without the input of the grandmothers, and very often their input would have been the information that would form a community decision. That, again, is one of those institutions, those values, that have been compromised because of the history of this particular country.
So we said we need to organize ourselves and have the opportunity to speak out against this kind of profound violence that our children are experiencing, because we know those children who are so hurt in their own families then become a part of the other systems. Again, it's another way of perpetuating that cycle of violence, including the 500 missing and murdered aboriginal women, the trafficking of aboriginal women.
We are led by three kookums. They're our spiritual leaders. Velma is one of them, and she has sent a message that she apologizes. An emergency has come up. She works for a group that works for residential school survivors, and sometimes these things happen. But I know she would want me to say that we are in the process of empowering ourselves or claiming our own responsibility again to be leaders in our communities and in our families.
For the past four years, Grandmothers has organized a sacred walk on a significant day in the indigenous people's calendar, September 21, which is moving between summer and fall, because everything we do is connected to the values that define us as an indigenous people. So our sacred walk has been very much supported by the community over the past. This will be the fourth year that we're doing it, and the message is to stop the violence perpetrated against aboriginal children—and all children, but of course we know that in this town it's primarily aboriginal children who are being hurt.
In my view, it's interesting that this committee is looking at justice and human rights, because I know that these are inextricably linked, that justice is a human right or a human right is justice. It's reversible. Again, that empowerment—first of all, the profound levels of disempowerment of people who think their only choices are to be something negative have been a part of a historical process that has led to this.
These systems are creating these monsters and nobody knows what to do with them, but underneath, they're just scared, frightened little children.
I have a friend who's on our board of directors. His name is Patrol Sergeant Cecil Swinson, a first nations police officer, who says, “You know, they act kind of tough out on the street, but you get them into the police car and they're crying for their mommas.” We can work with them, but we need the tools. We need the resources.
My sister here talked about turning the tides. It was one of five gang intervention programs through the youth gang prevention fund. Funding for that is coming to an end in March 2011, without any extension. We know that after that particular envelope of money was announced, by the time the project started rolling out, a year and a half had already expired in that envelope year, and now we're running out of funding in 2011. So we really need resources and support from our federal, provincial, and municipal counterparts to help us do this work.
Getting back to the grandmothers, it's 100% volunteer-driven, and one of the really neat little things that we just did recently, as a part of the provincial government's sexual exploitation awareness week, is the grandmothers went to the streets. I drive the streets of Winnipeg a lot and see young girls, children, on the street, sexually exploited children, but when you go to those places and see street after street of mostly aboriginal women in the dark and the cold and being sexually exploited, and when you target certain areas and you go and see them, you just see it in a very different light. It's very, very sad and there's lots of despair, but we also know that's not all of what defines them.
They were so happy to see the grandmothers come to them, offer them a sandwich, offer them a cup of coffee, offer them some love, letting them know they were more than that. They are so much more than that. They are our children and we love them, and we need to have the opportunity, as a fundamental human right, to work with our own children.
We can change this around. There's no doubt in my mind about that. I and these other women who have been working in this area don't need to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. We know how to work with our people. We know it and we know that we are successful when we do it. We just need the institutional support behind us to be able to do it.
Thank you.