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.