I have not seen any numbers to prove that it has decreased, but the awareness campaign that the AMC provides.... When I got involved with that committee over a year ago, I was really unaware of this whole issue. I had heard about it years ago, but I just didn't know.
What we do as chiefs is we try to express the importance of this campaign at the assemblies. Some males will kind of frown upon that type of discussion. In our communities, it's kind of like that. We try to make them aware of how important this is and how they need to go back to their communities and speak to their membership.
In our community, we had the AMC staff come out and do a presentation. A lot of our people said, “You know what? I never knew this before. I never knew this happened.” So that's really important. If you continue with a program such as that, where you're continuously providing that campaign out there....
I was involved with the walk we had here in the city. It was unbelievable the amount of people who showed up for that. When you have that type of awareness out there, at least it educates people, especially the young people. Those are the ones you have to really target. They, in turn, kind of educate their parents and grandparents.
To me, with AMC coordinating this it's really great, because it goes out to all the 63 first nations in Manitoba.