I'd simply like to add that I entirely agree with my colleague. In response to Mr. Desnoyers, regarding possible solutions—I also agree with Ms. Demers—I would say that there are two important aspects, in my view: education and governance.
The aboriginal communities, whether it be on reserve, in institutions, in villages or in northern and other municipalities, don't have enough governance, that is to say that they have quite little flexibility within the system. They receive programs and budgets that they have to implement, but that leave very little room for initiative. That's obviously very harmful because we can't withdraw everything from someone and hope for that person to remain independent. That makes no sense.
In fact, since I offer two full courses of three hours a week on colonization every semester, I often wonder—and every time, I'm dumb-founded—how much worse it could have been. Aboriginal people are much more resilient than we think. I say to myself that they lost their economy, their social system, we prohibited them their belief system, they were prohibited from even wearing their traditional costumes. They were prohibited a lot of things. Things should be worse, but they managed not to come out of it as badly as that. They have a lot of will. The communities in which I work are extremely dynamic. There are a lot of young people who want to pull through. So they have to be given more governance. It's more than a fashionable word, as my colleague said.
There's also education. I'm a university professor. My students appear before me in the first class, and I ask them what the 11 aboriginal nations of Quebec are. They live in Quebec, and most of them are Quebeckers. They know a few names here and there. They don't know where the communities are. They don't know how many there are. They don't even know that there are 11. They know nothing, and I mean “nothing”. They have vaguely heard about those communities. They have images of either fantastic people in harmony with nature or of very violent drunkards. There's nothing between the two.
I've been working with aboriginal people for more than 15 years. If it was that horrible, I would have changed occupations a long time ago. So education is fundamentally important. We often talk about the education of aboriginal people and say they have to be better trained and so on, but young Allochtones also have to be trained so they know a minimum. For example, I do a lot of work in regions. Most of the people don't know that the villages where they live have Indian names. That should be posted at the entrance to the village. We should have access to the toponyms so they are more visible. We live in a province where aboriginal people are quite invisible.
I've been to other provinces. Proportionally, of course, there are more aboriginal people. In Vancouver, for example, there is a certain aboriginal presence, if only in art, which is omnipresent, which is everywhere. In Quebec, where do we see the aboriginal presence? You walk around in Montreal and you could very well not know that the lookout on top of Mount Royal is called “Kondiaronk”, after the name of a great Indian chief. Where is that presence? What marks that presence? There's nothing.
So we have to take part in the visibility of aboriginal people, a positive visibility, and show that these are people who are part of society and that there are all kinds of people and occupations among them: workers, secretaries, designers, doctors, lawyers and so on. We have to start by showing that they also live in that society, that they are part of it and that they have a history that's worth the trouble of getting to know, an absolutely marvellous history. I would like that learning to start in primary school in fact. I would be pleased about that.