A lot of people from the east.
Evidence of meeting #49 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was women.
Evidence of meeting #49 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was women.
4:25 p.m.
A voice
A lot of people from the east.
4:25 p.m.
As an Individual
Well, certainly many of the factors, the predicting factors...if you have individuals who are living in poverty, who are trying to survive, they often find it easier to do so here. But I can't imagine that that's a major explaining factor.
I don't know if others or if you, Jane, would know what the explanation is for that.
4:25 p.m.
Professor, Criminology Department, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, As an Individual
I was going to say, with respect to aboriginal people, if we accept that the legacy of the residential schools plays a factor, then you have a strong history here, in British Columbia, of a residential school system, and not particularly well-run residential schools in the west. So that might be a contributing factor to the aboriginal situation.
4:25 p.m.
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Yes, but many of the aboriginal women who disappeared or were murdered hail from here, the west coast. I assume that they were not killed by aboriginals.
4:25 p.m.
Vice-President, Board of Directors, Warriors Against Violence Society
One of the reasons that comes to mind is class. Vancouver is divided into west and east. On the west side, houses are a lot bigger and a lot more expensive, and on the east side they're smaller and there are working-class families, although it's harder to live in the east end these days too. But I think class is one of the things in there, and class and race kind of go together as well. People who are lower class aren't thought of as highly, I guess, as people from a higher class.
4:25 p.m.
Former President of the Native Women's Association of Canada, As an Individual
Five seconds is not enough, but okay.
I've had this discussion before, because the highlights that came out of the Sisters in Spirit report were the higher numbers in the western provinces.
This is something I've been thinking. Colonization started in the east and then it slowly came across to the west. So the reporting of the numbers of women who have gone missing or have been found murdered is, to me, more prevalent in the west. Whether it's historical or generational...I don't know how to explain it more than that. When you're talking about the east...you have more generations that have been impacted by colonization as you move towards the west.
So if the reporting of women who have gone missing or are murdered...maybe your family has forgotten about it or there was no reporting of it. To me, it was also part of the Indian Act system and the whole membership issue as well, because a lot of women were forced from their communities when they married out. A whole bunch of issues still need to be looked at, because it may be the same; it's just the way it's been reported.
4:25 p.m.
NDP
Libby Davies NDP Vancouver East, BC
Well, actually, no. I was just going to say that I'm happy to hand over my time to the four panellists, just to make any closing remarks, so they'll each get a minute.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
4:25 p.m.
NDP
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Okay.
Before we go to closing remarks, because we do have some time for you to each give us about a minute of closing remarks, which is to sort of wrap up in a little capsule the things that you really feel you would like to leave with us that are important, I just wanted to follow up on that question about higher numbers in the west.
As we crossed the country, you saw that in the west there were larger numbers of aboriginal people living in cities. These are the people who were living off reserve. The urban aboriginals seem to be larger in number in the west than they were in other parts of Canada. Now, whether that has to do with treaty, whether that has to do with.... I have no idea. But I have a question I wanted to put forward here, because I've asked it before and I really need to get a handle on it, and that is the difference between what happens to people when they leave the reserve....
I know that on the reserve, if you're dealing with domestic violence on the reserve, you don't have anywhere to go. If you don't have a safe place to go, you can't leave the reserve; it's too far. And lack of services and being within the community, etc., is a difficult one. But when people leave the reserve, and we know that a lot of young women have told us that they run away from the reserve, fleeing what they consider to be familial violence, and they get into the cities, they're literally lost. No one—and this is my question—no one seems to want to take responsibility for urban aboriginal people.
In my book, the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility for all aboriginal people. It doesn't matter where they live. I know we talk about jurisdictions. I know we have heard in many places that in the cities the social services pick up kids. And when women don't have enough money to have a place to rent to keep their kids, they're terrified to report violence or to leave because their kids are going to be taken away from them. So they stay in abusive situations. They're in a catch-22 situation that's really bad.
But I still believe that when we hand off parts of taking care of aboriginal people's needs to different levels of government, when the federal government has the fiduciary responsibility—and I know I have asked for us to get the information on the fact that there was a decision made by the Supreme Court quite a few years ago with regard to the requirement to carry with the person the resources that are passed on for x number of people on reserve, if they leave the reserve, should the resources go with them so that they don't have to struggle outside of the reserve trying to find a government to be responsible—that, for me, seems to be a huge cyclical problem that is facing urban aboriginal people: nobody wants to take responsibility for them. I'd like to hear the answer for this from any of you if you'd like to hazard it.
The second thing I wanted to ask is about healing. You know that at one time, when originally if not an apology then a regret was made, there was money put into a fund for aboriginal people to be administered by aboriginal people. It was the Aboriginal Healing Fund. That is now gone and it's gone back into a bureaucracy. And yet we've heard that systemic violence among bureaucracies and institutions is core to the problem with systemic discrimination. So we've put it right back into a bureaucracy when it was shown by INAC that it was working, that it was actually giving that power and that autonomy back to people to deal with their own healing. So I would like to get a comment on the Aboriginal Healing Fund.
And finally, there's the self-esteem issue. We've all come to these meetings, and I have listened to them. When I was a secretary of state at one time, I met with many aboriginal people who didn't speak in public fora but we just talked around in a circle, and I heard a lot of things. And I understand what the colonial system and the residential schools did. I think public awareness is an important thing, and public education. I don't think a lot of people understand what the residential school system was. It was taking your kids away from you by force and then putting them into a place where they had no family, where they were made to feel isolated and dirty and horrible because their language was horrible, their race was horrible, everything about them was horrible. So the shame doesn't get healed with a self-esteem class, because you come out of the classes and you're back into a system where everyone is already judging you because you're Indian.
It's part of that hierarchy. Those kids went back out of residential school and didn't know how to parent. They had no relationship with their parents, so they brought in the only parenting they knew, which was what the schools did, and we have this cyclical sense of a lack of ability to parent, a lack of ability to have a sense of self. As a people you are proud. Identity, language, all those things that make you proud to be who you are were lost and continue to be lost.
I really want to hear somebody talk about this, because I don't think a lot of people know what the residential schools meant. They just think you went to school; it was like a private school, and then you got kicked out, and shouldn't you get better? Isn't it about time you grew out of this?
I don't buy that, because it's a cycle, a complete inability of parents to become parents and grandparents because they didn't know what it was. It was taken away from them. Then there's that shame of being who you are, and every time you walk down the street, no matter how good you feel about yourself as an individual, somebody looks at you and says, “There's an Indian.”
How do you ever walk away from that systemic sense of violence when people judge you the minute they look at you because you look like an Indian and because you are an Indian? What is it that we can do? I want to hear this.
4:35 p.m.
Professor, Criminology Department, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, As an Individual
It's interesting that you would bring up the residential schools, because in my class today we were talking about the residential schools. These are second-year criminology students. I asked how many in the class had heard of residential schools, and virtually everybody had. Then I asked what was their notion, one thing they thought they knew for sure about residential schools, and just in polling that one group who are studying criminology, the amount of inaccuracy and error was high, and there was even some denial that things had really happened. It was good that there was a climate where that could be said out loud, so we could talk about it and deal with it.
I was sharing with them that after six years now of being involved in the alternative hearing process, and hearing mainly elderly people, sometimes on deathbeds, talking about their residential school experiences, I understood deeply that what they mainly want is an opportunity to tell their story and to hear the apology, as opposed to anything financial. If there is something financial that they're looking for, it's in relation to things they want to give to families they're leaving behind. There's that deep need for healing and to be heard. The wonderful thing about that process, even though it has its limitations, is it does give an uninterrupted time for the story and the things that are evoked.
I was trying to explain to my students what is evoked in those meetings. It disturbed me at the beginning of those hearings when sometimes, if something came out that wasn't in the written report they had submitted--the tick box wasn't filled out and something came out--they were sending that back to the investigators. A number of those protested that and said, “No, the story needs to come out. These are truths that are coming out.” This is evoking really deep hurt and pain and shame, and all the things you were just describing.
I can't speak to the healing fund specifically because I don't have knowledge of it, but I do want to leave this committee with certainly my view that there is a deep need for healing kinds of things. I hope it's positively framed, though. I hope that maybe this report can celebrate the gifts that aboriginal people have to give our whole nation in terms of what they understand is needed for us all. My understanding of restorative justice is deeply embedded with aboriginal traditions--not only that tradition, but how can that be celebrated in ways that we in Canada and as nations can find healing, collaborative and restorative ways to communicate and grow together?
I hope your report will do that in positive ways so that we can celebrate the gifts we have from first nations.
4:35 p.m.
Former President of the Native Women's Association of Canada, As an Individual
Your first question, about the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, was my second priority, about healing resources for men and women to end violence. Part of the healing foundation was to address the cycle of violence as a result of residential schools. I do believe those resources need to be reinstated. It was a really good process, because it was at the community level where those resources were being used. It provided those counselling services and elder services. It even provided language programs, self-esteem, whatever kinds of things went along with it.
One of the things I want to also respond to is that we still live in a very racist society. We live in a society in which Indians are still thought of as inferior. We're still thought of as we were historically, as being primitive. So part of this whole process is not only about what's needed for aboriginal communities, but it's also what's needed for white mainstream communities to educate themselves about the role they play as the descendants of treaties, as descendants of colonizers, because they also need to end the violence of racism.
I have been teaching for a long time, and many times I talk about these things in our classes and it's the first time at a university level that they've ever heard these things. So the whole mainstream education system needs to change the way history is taught. The whole residential school system needs to be implemented in that historical context within the schools, and who we are as a people and that we still exist.
Chair, you had talked about how things have been lost. Well, they haven't been lost. We're still here. I'm still here, as a Mohawk woman, to tell you what occurred in my community. We still have the elders in our community who speak the language. We still have the resilience of our people because of our spirituality. Despite everything that's happened, our spirit is still strong, despite 500-plus years of the impact of colonization.
So I can sit here and talk to you in a respectful way about those impacts on our people, and on women especially. I always have had to give thanks to my ancestors and to those who have taught me about that honour and respect about being a woman, but also about the respect that we have in carrying that forward, and the responsibilities that we continue to have.
We've carried out our responsibilities. Now it has to be on the other side. I always think about our Two Row Wampum Treaty belt. We've done what we've done in our canoe. We've maintained our sovereignty in our canoe. But non-aboriginal colonizers and the descendants of colonizers haven't. They've violated that treaty because they've never taken on that responsibility of taking on their own responsibilities.
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Bev.
Russell, do you have one more thing to say quickly, and then we'll wrap up?
4:40 p.m.
Vice-President, Board of Directors, Warriors Against Violence Society
Yes. There's so much to think about, to ponder, and to get across, but in terms of the aboriginal population--the urban aboriginal population--we do need access to cultural teachings. I come from a community where my language is on the endangered list of becoming extinct, so what do I tell my kids? I'll teach them what I know, but that can only go so far. To tell them to go back to my community and learn all of that...it's not entirely possible all the time.
So for getting access to cultural teachings wherever you are in Canada, we do that at the grassroots level already anyway, but having some support is always helpful.
I'm thankful for the support of Kiwassa House. They've given us rooms in their building to have meetings and whatnot. There's the Native Education College and all these places that are reaching out to the community and providing free space for a little while.
Ending systemic violence against aboriginal people and aboriginal women is another issue. Providing affordable housing for all people is another that comes to mind. Also, there's the issue of keeping families together. We're assuming that we're talking about aboriginal families and we're assuming that they're all together, but a lot of times the children are in foster care and a lot of times parents don't see them until they're 18 or whatever. So it's about ending that cycle of taking the kids away, you know, the residential school.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Russell.
I said I would give you 30 seconds each to quickly wrap up. We are now at the end of our session, but if you feel you need to say something for 30 seconds....
Go, Jane, for 30 seconds.
4:45 p.m.
Professor, Criminology Department, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, As an Individual
When I take students to women in prison, that is almost the most transformative experience they have. I find that very ironic--the most disadvantaged people are giving the biggest gift to my students.
So I agree with Beverley's comment. I hope there's something in your report about the education system and what we need to do, because students are being profoundly affected by those opportunities to meet aboriginal women. I hope you won't forget them in your report either.