Thank you.
The stew with bannock is on. We're happy that you're all coming and everyone is invited.
I wanted to thank you for opening the table so that I could present, even though I wasn't scheduled.
It's really critical for our services, because according to how the Government of the Northwest Territories defines things, women who stay at our shelter are not considered to be battered women or women living in or fleeing violence, even though they all do.
Our shelter is categorized as a homeless shelter, and our funding is one-third of what you would find in at least some shelters for battered women.
Part of what I hope to do is talk about the work we do, why we're important, and how we take sort of a different approach. Part of it is really to talk about the systemic barriers we find as an agency that serves marginalized women and how we could improve those.
The Centre for Northern Families has been in existence for 20 years. I came here when I was 18 years old. I hitchhiked up from a farm, and I was fleeing family violence and sexual abuse. I came to this community, and I hung out with the girls and the women from N'dilo and Dettah and the girls at Akaitcho Hall, and I found a real family of women whose experience was similar to mine. They opened their arms to embrace my challenges as I kind of rooted around in the community and tried to re-establish myself emotionally, physically, and in every way to become a contributor to the community that I ended up moving to.
Over the years the Centre for Northern Families was born out of the fact that we were just women in trouble trying to help each other. It began with women whose children had been apprehended at child welfare, women who didn't even know what was being presented to them in English, women who didn't speak English, and who were losing their children to a system they really didn't understand. The Centre for Northern Families is really rooted in experience.
Some people were talking earlier about mentorship and how important that is, and how important it is that you look at lived experience as a real benefit when you are providing services to the women who are escaping violence.
The Centre for Northern Families does give priority to hiring and training aboriginal and Inuit women. We do have aboriginal women in management and leadership roles within our agency. We meet with chiefs in the communities. In fact I just came back last week from a meeting with a chief in a small community who was very supportive, very kind, and very funny. At the end of the visit he said “I can't sit here talking about women all day”, so that was the end of our conversation. I said I would let him go, and he could talk about men after I left.
Northern people in Nunavut and in the NWT certainly generally have heard of the Centre for Northern Families, and that recognition resulted in our work being acknowledged through the Order of Canada. More importantly, we get calls from people all across the territories and Nunavut thanking us when we really put our neck on the line to step up and speak out against the violence we find being perpetrated against northerners generally and against women in particular.
I wanted to focus on the fact that we find that colonization is the root of the situation in which we find ourselves today, but part of the escalation in violence against women, from my perspective, is the fact that there is ongoing oppression. Residential schools have not ended. That method has not gone away. It hasn't disappeared, and it has not ended. It has transformed itself into the foster care system and into other oppressive kinds of systems, like income support, like the correctional centre, and all of the systems that take such a European approach, something that is really foreign to how northern people do things.
I am reminded of a study that was done in a region of the Northwest Territories that showed that four out of five girls had been sexually abused by the time they were 18, and three out of five boys had been sexually abused by the time they were 18. That study was done a long time ago.
I just wanted to highlight the fact that we have two challenges. We have lots of challenges, but I want to address two specific challenges today. One is racialized violence, which we find very prevalent in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
The other challenge is the fact that it is gender violence, not family violence. I find that we're not permitted in the Northwest Territories to talk about anything but family violence. From my perspective, that's because people want to put that out there as being a family problem, not a societal or a systemic problem.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was that this means, going back to what Lyda talked about, that there is a real sort of angst in the community, in that everybody is in trouble, not just women. How do you deal with the fact that everybody is in trouble?
Part of what I wanted to highlight is that those systemic responses that take such a European approach are very unfamiliar and foreign to people. It's very discriminatory and very punitive. I'll just let you know that in the child welfare system in the Northwest Territories, 97% of the children who have been apprehended are aboriginal. That is an astounding statistic when you look at the fact that across Canada it's 50%--already, people would say, too high for the support that's supposed to be out there for families.
Do I have to wrap it up?