I'm more comfortable in English. So I'm going to answer you in English.
We talk about decolonization, and colonization was also inflicted by the church, and I mean no disrespect to any people who are Christians here. It affected their sexuality. It affected the role of women and the value of women, and equality with men in our communities.
I think what we need within the communities themselves is to educate our own people. It's not just about educating the government; it's also educating our own people, who also practise discrimination legally because of the Indian Act. They can say to a woman, “Well, you married a non-native, so you can't live here”, or “Your children are not important, they're not considered Indians because their father and grandfathers were non-native.”
To me, we need a lot of work in the community and to discuss among ourselves, but we're busy surviving. We're busy making do with the money that is allocated to each community, done in piecemeal kinds of ways.
I think what we need is in the education system itself, in primary school and in high school, it should be the requirement of anybody who wants to run as chief to know what is the impact of violence. How has colonization impacted us in regard to the level of violence that we see in the communities?
Let's look at the Catholic church. The Pope says don't use condoms. Well, you know what that means to a man who has contracted HIV/AIDS, and he says to his wife or his girlfriend that if she really loved him, she wouldn't make him wear a condom. So we find that aboriginal women, even though we're a small percentage of the population, also have the fastest growing rate of contracting AIDS. Another part of the coin that we fail to include in the discussions with government is how the church or religion is used against us.
Education is I think one of the key factors in educating police, lawyers, social workers, especially Québécois social workers, and I'm just going to talk about Quebec here. One of the things we find with social workers is that they will take away the children of a woman who lives in poverty simply because she's poor. We've asked the Quebec government not to include poverty in their definition of negligence. We have to look at what is the situation in the community—high unemployment, poverty. We can't address this issue of violence without looking at some of the factors that contribute to it, and legislation and how it contributes to the devaluing of women by saying, “Well, you and your children are not good enough to live on the reserve.” INAC creates the membership code, the criteria, and there are four different kinds of membership codes the band can have. It doesn't follow our customs, it doesn't follow our traditions, but it can legally discriminate against an aboriginal woman in moving back into her community. She can have status in Ottawa, but she can't have her membership and access to services in the community.
So what the Indian Act has done is it has broken the family unit. It has broken that and it has severed us from those kinds of wonderful cultural values that make everyone equal, that make everyone know they are precious and that they are part of the world we live in.
I know I can wax philosophical on this, but education at every single level, on what violence is, whether it's sexual violence, institutionalized violence, racism.... The women who are heading to urban areas are doing that out of survival. If they work on the street, they're doing it out of survival, and especially if you're an anglophone in Quebec. If you don't speak French, you're not going to get a job. I'm sorry, you're not going to get a job. So this is another challenge for us in Quebec, if we do not speak French.
We have to learn French and English. What about our indigenous language?