Thank you.
I would like to take us in camera for a moment, so I need to save some time to do that.
I just want to thank the witnesses for being here and for giving us.... Obviously, we were not talking to people who are field workers; we were talking to people who are researching the whole cultural system. I just want to say one thing. Coming from a country that was colonized--many of us who come from the Commonwealth know what it is to be colonized--I understand very much what the aboriginal communities have suffered.
I was talking to a friend the other day and I was discussing the fact that we are hearing about violence and about the issues. This person lives in the downtown east side of Vancouver, and he said to me, “I'm sick and tired of all this whining.” This is what he said to me. He said, “You know what? Some people were stronger and they came and they took their land, so they've just got to live with that.” I listened to this and I thought, wow, where did you come from?
I think the whole concept at that time was that western civilization and Europe and Britain were all the powers of the world and they came and they took over the New World, and of course they knew best. They were the civilization and these people were savages. So they had to show them that their lives were wrong, the way they lived was wrong, and everything they did was wrong, and they had to tell them that they knew how they could live better. That was the essence of what colonialism was about, to come and tell other people that you knew they were just a bunch of savages, and you were civilized and you were going to tell them how they should do things.
The absolute need for “reculturalization” is an important thing. I know you talked about going west and seeing how things are. I know we're trying in small ways. It's absolutely not perfect. But I do know that every time the premier of our province, no matter what his political stripe--and I say “his” because we only have guys who are premiers--stands up, no matter where he is, and before he speaks, he says, “I want to thank the Salish Nation”--or the Musqueam Nation or whoever--“for having us live on their land.” It's a simple statement. I know I do it, and we do it all the time, and Mr. Martin used to do it. It's saying, I know I am here on your land and this is not mine. It reiterates the sense that we are here as people who came later.
A lot of work is being done by UBC on anthropology. They discovered the Hatzic Rock, and they did a dig in that area in Abbotsford, in British Columbia. They found, with carbon dating, that the aboriginal culture existed 40,000 years ago. They went back and found that 20,000 years ago the aboriginal people were trading all the way down the coast of the Americas. They were bringing in minerals and stuff that did not belong in British Columbia, and they found them in these digs.
The aboriginal people had hugely organized governments and huge amounts of trade went on. They were societies that were not perfect. I don't believe any society is perfect. But the point that one would decide that they are useless, and the fact that we have a whole lot of people now who are absolutely living with the idea that they are useless, and savage, and that whatever or whoever they are is absolutely unworthy, is something that it doesn't take five years to fix.
The only way we can start doing it is by actually listening, by learning, and I believe by helping to ensure that we give back that culture the respect it deserves, and say, you've got to have the answers; we can't impose them on you. That, I believe, is what we hopefully will be hearing as we go on. Everything we hear from everyone is usually reiterative of what went on.
But I think you have given us a much better perspective on the long term and the problems that aboriginal people will face. In the west there were many matriarchal societies among aboriginal peoples, and the lineage of the chief was handed down through the women, so this is not necessarily a male-dominated society. We see that things have changed because of the fact that many aboriginal people were taught that patriarchal societies were the ones that would actually always work.
Thank you for coming. I'm really pleased that you came, because looking at this through the anthropological lens and through the historical and cultural lens will hopefully give us a much better understanding of where we need to go as we come up with recommendations and as we write a report, which I hope will be sensitive and not the usual politically correct kind of stuff that quite often parliamentary committees put forward.
I think we have a real opportunity to change things. We have a real opportunity to make a difference to something that's been going on for so long, and I'm hoping this committee will have the courage to do exactly that.
Thank you for coming.
I'd like to suspend and go in camera, please, just for a few minutes.
I would ask those who can't stay to please quickly leave the room.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
