I want to be really clear. It's not that one is better than the other or anything like that, but they are different.
Many of the first nations women, other than in maybe the past two decades, have come from reserve communities where there were structures in place and homes in place and things that were available to them that have never been available to the Métis women.
First nations women have access to health care resources, so they can get medicine for their children. They can get eye care or dental care. Those things have never existed for Métis women, so our experiences have been very different.
I'm only going to tell you this from a Métis perspective: I'm grateful that we were never put into the dependency of social mechanisms like many of our first nations people were. In our community we went to work. We were proud to work. We acquired things. We built our own houses. Sometimes it was a fight to get there, but those were things we could call accomplishments and achievements.
I think some of the first nations challenges now are based on the social dependencies that were created from a long time ago. Our community doesn't have those same social dependencies, so there are differences.
And there are differences in our cultures. We come from a mixed race of people, and our elders always tell us that we took the best of both worlds to make who we are today. We are of a mixed place, so we have cultural things that we've brought forward both from our European ancestors and from our first nations grandmothers. So we have to accept both of those things as part of who we are.