Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Michelle Corfield, and I am from the Uchucklesaht First Nation, which is part of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council.
In my former life I was a politician who represented 14 first nations. In that life I witnessed the murder of two young teenage girls and sat through those trials.
This stuff is deep-rooted in our communities, in our reserves, and where we live. We can view this as structural poverty: economic marginalization from the patriarchal system that has been imposed upon us.
That's our reality, and we believe that if we're to talk about root causes, the root cause is the patriarchal system, such as the Indian Act that was imposed upon us. It just stems from there.
You asked for solutions. I'm going to read the solutions first. If I have time, I'll tell a story, but five minutes is really not enough time, and instead of crying I'm just going to go into it.
We need an independent inquiry into missing and murdered children.
We need a national action plan that must put support for families at the very centre.
We must not respond with only more protection; more broadly, we must address root causes. This means broad engagement of communities, rebuilding communities, and emphasizing the critical role of women in dispute resolution and as community healers.
The women are the core of our communities. They are the centre. They have been excluded from all levels of participation: locally, regionally, provincially, and nationally. We need to increase the representation of women as our chiefs and on councils. They need to have the same opportunities as were given everybody else.
So far, we are seeing responses that only react and only put resources in the hands of authority. We must do better. We must support family and work together to build stronger solutions. We must start from the infants and work our way up. We need to raise healthy children so we can have strong, educated women and we can be providers to our families, and so we're not stuck in the cycle of poverty again.
We need financial support to create and sustain change at the local level. We need education, training, and healing. We need to create whole people. We need to look after our women and our children mentally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally.
If we were to do some of those things, we would relieve the violence against women. And as I say, in the names of Beatrice Jack and Kayla John, we have to do something better so that we are not seeing 12-year-old girls violently murdered in their communities.
We have to. We can no longer allow this to become acceptable behaviour. We need to make change, and change now.
So from a political perspective, thank you.