Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women Committee on Nov. 21st, 2013

[Robyn Hall]

That was something we were just talking about. In our community, it is the RCMP, and they are actually stationed an hour away from our community. The difficulty we have with that is the turnover.

When we first began this process in 1985, as Burma was saying, we brought on the RCMP, the prosecutors, the defence, and the judge. The difficulty we have with this is that new people come in to fill those roles all the time, whereas in our community a lot of those roles remain the same throughout the years. It's almost a continuous re-education.

In the RCMP office, we probably don't have anybody who has been there continuously for the past 10 years. At one time, the whole office actually turned over within a year.

That remains an issue for us: continuously educating the outside services in regard to our process.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you very much.

[Burma Bushie]

To add to what Robyn said, I think it's....

Did you say something?

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

We have to move on, I'm afraid, but hopefully you'll get a chance to explain what you were going to say in using another question as the basis.

[Burma Bushie]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

Ms. McLeod, you're next.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us tonight. As we try to reach for solutions, I think it's really helpful for us to hear from programs that are obviously making a real difference in the lives of the communities and to hear about what's working and what's not.

I know that every community is very different, but you seem to have something that's successful for your community. Are your neighbouring communities saying that they want to do what you're doing? Are they managing to do it also, obviously while changing things in a way that meets their community's needs? Is there anyone else doing what you're doing and how you're doing it?

[Burma Bushie]

To answer that, I'll say that we participated in numerous studies by government. That cost analysis was just one of them.

We have developed a protocol that has been sanctioned by the provincial government, and the whole community approach includes the Métis communities surrounding our community. There are three Métis communities surrounding us. They're also part of the community approach.

The other thing is that we've opened our doors to communities outside, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, and they've come from far and wide to see what we have developed. We've always told them that any piece they can use out of this process is theirs to use.

Those are four avenues that we've tried to get that message across.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I'm from British Columbia. I'm the member of Parliament for the Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo area. You made that comment about your community being an hour away from the RCMP. I'm sorry, but I don't have the geography in my head. One thing I know that has been a very significant issue in British Columbia is the issue of women hitchhiking at night into town. Is that an issue in your community, and have you come up with anything? That's often where many of the tragedies have happened. Have you tackled that issue in any way, or is it an issue for you?

[Burma Bushie]

At one time there was the issue of young women and men attempting suicide. They would be taken to a hospital in Pine Falls, by ambulance or some other way.

When they were taken by ambulance, once they were out of danger they were out the door and on their own. We had to set up a committee on our reserve, and we took our list of volunteers, with their numbers, to the hospital. We asked the staff there to please give us a call if anyone from Hollow Water, Manigotagan, or Seymourville came there and was discharged in the middle of the night. We didn't want people on the highway in the middle of the night. That's what we had to do.

It's the same thing with people who are let go from jail. Usually, it happens in the morning, after they have been kept in jail overnight. Their people are not phoned. They're just out the door. We didn't want them on the highway. That's another place where we had to leave our numbers.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

It sounds as though you, as a community, came up with a plan. Would you say you've now solved that problem? Is it still working for you, so that nobody is being kicked out the door and is on their own trying to get back home?

[Burma Bushie]

It's not so much the community anymore; it's the families doing that for each other.

There are family members who will go pick up people in Pine Falls from jail or from the hospital.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Looking at your community, what do you think is the biggest challenge you need to deal with now?

[Burma Bushie]

I think the same challenges are there to varying degrees.

As I said, we're still plodding along. We're heading to our vision. A lot of times the children are the ones who push and move community along. You never go from A to B in a straight line when you're dealing with community. It's almost as though we're coming out of a valley and we need to regroup again and look at what's working and what we need to work on. We're at that place again, and it's usually the children who give us the strength and the drive to deal with what needs to be dealt with.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

Thank you very much.

We'll go over to you, Ms. Mathyssen.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Bushie and Ms. Hall, for speaking to us. I have to confess that I'm sometimes amazed that you're still willing to talk to us. There has been report after report and we're still struggling to really achieve concrete solutions.

At any rate, I wanted to pick up on what you said with regard to the need for long-term permanent funding. We've heard a great deal from the government about addressing violence related to the trafficking of women.

I just found out that an Edmonton shelter that deals with human trafficking has closed. It's closing now because it lost its Status of Women funding. It was cut off, so that shelter closed.

I'm thinking about what you said, Ms. Hall, regarding the loss of the healing foundation money and how you had to scramble to find money from some of your existing programs and patch something together.

Did the existing programs, which you've worked so hard to put together, suffer in any way because you had to borrow from them and manage with the loss of the healing foundation funds?

[Robyn Hall]

Yes, for sure. By losing our funding, we had to pretty much go down to the bare bones of what it was we wanted to offer in terms of programming. We had to figure out what we wanted to keep and figure out how we could keep that. It probably took about two years to establish that. So within that two-year timeframe...we lost a lot of programming, to begin with, because we had to re-establish it somewhere else.

I mean no disrespect to this government, but it seems that once we have a program that's running and that's working, if we do well, then it's as if someone says, “Okay, you're doing well enough, so we're going to scrap the program”, and then they move on to something else. For instance, we had the NAYSPS funding at one time, which is the national aboriginal youth suicide prevention strategy. We had put in a proposal for it, and they asked us how many suicides we had within that year. Our number was very low, which we credit to a lot of programs we have, so there was no need to...“No, this program is no longer needed because you do not have the number of suicides.” We're obviously doing something good that we don't have a lot of suicides. It's almost like it's taken as, “Okay, that's cured, so we're going to move on to something else.”

But it's building the approaches that we need to focus on. When we had the healing foundation, we were building on what we saw as moving our community forward. We saw the prevention strategies of building our identity and getting those programs in place, and then it stopped again. Then we had to restructure and go back a couple of steps, restructure, and now we're building again.

For me, especially in providing service in health and in justice, funding and juggling funding is often difficult within programming. It seems like it takes a step back and then it moves forward, then two steps back, and then it moves forward.

With CHCH, the Community Holistic Circle Healing funding, we have gone from a three-year program to a yearly basis now, so it's having to justify it from year to year. Then we end up going into survival mode with programs, rather than focusing on the program itself.

Does that answer your question?

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Yes. I do appreciate that answer, and this is the complaint that we've heard over and over again. Everything is start-up funding. As soon as you show that you're making progress, the funding is gone. It's as if there's no sense of planning or continuity.

What would you do if miraculously you got your healing foundation money restored? What would you be able to do?

[Robyn Hall]

When we had the healing foundation funding in our community, we actually took three streams because we wanted to look in different areas. One of them was a land-based program that focused on a lot of the physical needs, the cultural, the spiritual, and the ceremonial. Then we had what we call the SPA, which was the Society for the Preservation of Anishnabe, which focused on our history and revitalizing all of our ceremonies. Then we had our culture and our bands lodge, and it encompassed everybody in our community.

When the healing foundation stopped, we lost all three for a short time. Then we began to put the land-based program into our school. But we had difficulty with the funding for the Society for the Preservation of Anishnabe, so we essentially had to divide it into a whole bunch of different areas, and it's been dispersed quite a bit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

Thank you. We're going to move on.

We've got about four minutes left, and I'd like Ms. Brown to get her time in.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Madam Chair and ladies, I'm new to the committee. I've only just joined tonight as my first meeting. However, in 2010 I sat on the status of women committee, and we undertook a study on violence against aboriginal women. It would be very interesting to pull that study out and take a look at it, in light of what we are discussing here tonight.

Ms. Bushie, you made a comment a little bit earlier that I'm a little confused about, and I wonder if perhaps I didn't get the right context or if there is some clarification.

You made the comment—and this isn't a direct quote, I'm afraid—that there was a time when violence against women was acceptable. Did I hear that correctly? Is that what you intended to say, or am I hearing it improperly?

[Burma Bushie]

Yes, that's what I intended to say. That's the history of my community.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Can you tell me when that time was and what's changed that attitude?

[Burma Bushie]

That attitude changed from our decision as women and as service providers in the community at the time. We all came together and came up with a declaration that abuse was going to stop. We didn't know how, but it was going to stop. From just saying the words, it seemed to snowball in ways that brought the whole issue of abuse, family violence, elder abuse, all those things, to centre stage. No one in our community could any longer run and hide and deny that this problem was there.

We really broadcasted it. We brought it out in the open. We got our chief and council to do resolutions stating that there was abuse against women and children and against elders. These are groups of people that, as aboriginal people, work to protect our children. That was the message that every Anishinabe person understood. We used all those values that I know I grew up with; people my age hung onto the values, even with all the chaos happening.

That was kind of our talisman, I guess you would call it, bringing in our children and allowing our children to speak about what was happening to them. That was another thing that really pushed us to deal with the problem.

It was all about changing the attitude. No man or grandfather or uncle in my community can ever say that their niece invited rape. No one. Even to this day. That is one thing, in spite of the valleys we've had to go through—with funding changes and people moving on and leaving—that has always been very clear in our minds as women in our community.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

I'm told I'm out of time.

I have some other questions, but perhaps we can pursue them another time.

Thank you very much.