Status of Women Committee on Jan. 20th, 2011

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have thirty seconds, please.

[Therese Villeneuve]

Okay. I just want to focus on the root causes.

As you know, many of us have suffered from the impact of residential schools in our lives. Aboriginal people were not violent people in the past. The men did not abuse their wives, their families. We were brought up on the land. The women were very, very honoured.

I think if we're going to go back to that, one of the programs that could be really supported is the on-the-land program. We can go back and renew all this honour that we were once born into, and used to, and lived, because our aboriginal culture, it's what we lived. This is not our aboriginal culture, the situation we are in right now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Ms. Villeneuve.

Now I will go to Lyda?

[Lyda Fuller]

Yes. I'm here now--

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

For the YWCA.

[Lyda Fuller]

--for the YWCA, yes, but on behalf of our shelter for women fleeing violence, women and their children.

I won't go through the statistics. They're listed here. It's very high in the north.

I just want to say that most women in NWT communities face formidable barriers to accessing services and support to escape from violence. There are only five shelters in the NWT that serve 33 communities spread over a vast area. Women often in the communities without shelters have to go a local social service worker to get their trip to a shelter paid for. And often this person can be related to the partner that the women is trying to escape.

Violence starts early in their relationships and continues through child-bearing years. We see very young women with a number of children already who repeatedly come to our shelter. By the time they can really think about how they want to change that violence in their lives, they're tied down with child rearing and see no way out. They are busy caring for their children, the housing options are limited, and there are really significant community sanctions for disclosure of abuse. That's often a barrier to seeking meaningful help.

Women use the shelters as respite for periods of time, to regroup and go back. Elders use the shelter in this way too. We have seen women in their sixties and seventies, with multiple healed fractures, who get dumped out into snowbanks and come into the shelter.

Women often don't think change is possible because the abuse is endemic. It's often what they have known and grown up with. And women have sympathy for their partners, because their partners have been abused as well. When you look at the root causes around cultural disruption, and residential schools, everybody in the community is suffering. A lot of times women don't see the larger system as offering helpful support. They want to heal as a community.

The women who come to us say that it's primarily physical and emotional abuse, but we see a wide range of all the types of abuse. We see women beaten severely who then miscarry while they're at the shelter. We see women who can hardly walk due to beatings. We see women who end up leaving the shelter and are beaten to death. We see women who are held against their will and then physically abused over periods of time, who give notes to their children to take to school asking for help. We see women who jump out of vehicles in the liquor store parking lot and hop into taxicabs to come to the shelter.

We see a lot of young women from Nunavut communities who access shelter services here in Yellowknife. As isolated as you can be in this territory, you can be even more so in Nunavut. Transportation is very costly, so often we are the cheapest alternative.

Resources in Nunavut are scarce. I'd like to make a real plea, on behalf of Nunavut, for better support to those shelters there, because they really do need that. Women often go back to bleak circumstances. We have women in from the small communities in Nunavut who might have a child with a disability. They're struggling. They've come to the shelter, and the partner has moved another woman into their home. So what do they go back to? These women have no economic independence and sometimes few alternatives because of that.

Recently a woman come to us from a Nunavut community. She and her five kids were put into cells in the Nunavut community because that was the safest place there until they could arrange for a flight to get her and the five kids to come out. Partners, however, it seems to us, have no trouble following the women to the communities with shelter and will often drive by the shelter to make sure that we see them, and that the women see them. That becomes a threat in itself. It's interesting, because when you talk to the communities and the referral agents, they say “She's coming for counselling. This is her problem and she's coming for help.”

We have been facilitating emergency protection orders. That's been really helpful except in the small communities without RCMP, because there is no way for that to be followed up. We have received phone calls from women who have obtained emergency protection orders and then they're left without food, baby food, and diapers. We take supplies out to them because they're economically tied to that partner and he's now gone from the home.

Women who are at high risk often have few supports long-term. We try to keep them safe in our transitional housing, but if that partner is known to the other tenants and they're scared of him—watch out. We had emergency protection orders granted and that has been helpful

The last thing I want to end on is the work we're doing with the other women's groups in the eleven small communities without RCMP, which I think is a key to what we want to do. Communities need community healing and community development.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I'm going to give you an extra minute to quickly expand on what you just said.

[Lyda Fuller]

One of the key pieces is around community development. Healing and community development are inseparable. You need the whole community to heal and come together to address some of these issues. Healing and community development are not on the radar for funding. It's very necessary. It needs to happen and there are few resources to help that.

The women in the eleven small communities have been very thankful that we've managed to get some pots of money to look at working with those women and working within the broader context of that community. The women are very savvy. They say, “We don't want the community to be upset that you're coming in to help us, so let's have a community feast. Let's bring in some resources. We want to do this, but let's share those resources with the school.” It's really a key issue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to go to Arlene Hache.

We're coming to visit your place a little later on, Arlene. Thank you very much.

Arlene is from the Yellowknife Women's Society, the Centre for Northern Families.

You have a few minutes. Please go ahead.

[Arlene Hache, Executive Director, Centre for Northern Families, Yellowknife Women's Society]

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?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Yes, please.

[Arlene Hache]

I have solutions. Do I have two minutes for solutions?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

No, you don't have two minutes, but I am sure one of our colleagues will be pleased to ask you for your solutions in the question and answer session.

Thank you very much.

I would now like to go to Sandra Lockhart, who is chair of the Public Service Alliance of Canada's aboriginal peoples committee.

[Sandra Lockhart, Chair, PSAC, Aboriginal Peoples Committee, As an Individual]

Hi there. I'm just nervous. It's an amazing thing, eh?

I want to start by saying that I'm the daughter of John and Mary Head from Mistawasis First Nation. I'm a Dakota Cree woman originally born into Treaty 6. I exercised my nationhood and mobility right and transfered to Lutselk'e First Nation when I married my husband, who is Denis Sikoulin.

I would also like to acknowledge the teachings of my elders--and it will help me too. They say that when I go to places like that, I should make it very clear that I don't talk for all aboriginal people. Also, take a moment to pray, because I have ancestors behind me who live in me, and I'm hopefully speaking for the future.

I want to cry. I need to settle down. I'm going to take a minute to do that. I hope this is not offensive to anyone.

[Witness speaks in Cree]

I'm asking that you come and speak with me and help me today as my grandfather and my helper. Creator, I'm thanking you again for giving me life and being able to share whatever it is you're guiding me to do. Forgive me if I speak wrongly and offend people.

As the chair of the NWT aboriginal peoples committee, it's very important that we were formed. In 1994 the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the union, began to recognize that aboriginal people were not being acknowledged as aboriginal people in Canada. For the union to be as progressive as we are, we needed to have a policy paper that would speak to that. I want to read a couple of phrases and I want to talk a little bit about our community in the north, because we're very involved with social justice. I also want to say that I went through the whole residential school, and I am one of the people who aren't acknowledged. The government decided, no, your experience doesn't exist for us. I'm also a foster parent and a community member.

The 1994 policy says that the Public Service Alliance “supports the right of aboriginal peoples to self-determination, encourages all governments in Canada to fulfill their historic treaty obligations...”--and I'll just insert something here.

I think that's very important, because I think a lot of Canadians have forgotten that they're treaty people too. I don't think our schools or our governments are educating us: if you're Canadian, you also are treaty, because those treaties weren't made in isolation just with us. They were made on behalf of Canadians and Canada. It's just that as aboriginal people today we want to benefit from that treaty as well as Canadians have done.

In the alliance, we want to encourage all governments in Canada to fulfill their historic treaty obligations, and we urge the timely and just settlement of all land claims. The alliance believes that aboriginal people have been historically disadvantaged, both in society and the workplace, and supports mechanisms that re-addresses this disadvantage.

Aboriginal peoples have the right to employment in the professions they wish to pursue. The alliance believes that employment equity initiatives are fully justified and necessary mechanisms to ensure that aboriginal peoples are provided the opportunity to pursue their chosen careers. The alliance will work to ensure that our union itself is fully accessible to all aboriginal members and that it thoroughly represents the interests of those members.

In the north here, in the NWT, we formed a committee. We have several aims and objectives, but there is one that speaks loudest to me. We work with other organizations, so we do partner. We believe in partnership, because it's very cultural. We don't talk about families or individuals like they're isolated; we talk about nationhood and we talk about community. It's real, and we still try to live that way, and when we come up against policies, it hits at the core of who we are.

So when my sister here talks about policies that are still hitting us, it's very, very true. I know that within PSAC we're going to be addressing what some of systemic policies are that are still there for assimilation and are killing us culturally. We're going to be reviewing that.

We want to support. Our committee works with supporting aboriginal peoples. It's not just in the workplace. It's not having this part at work, this part at home, and this part in society; it's your full life. It's to support aboriginal peoples in their struggle for full access to all human rights and the fundamental freedoms of their right to preserve and strengthen their own political, economic, and legal traditions and institutions.

We want to be active in our own country. This is our homeland. It's not like we can go back to some other place. This is it. We want what governments have been talking about and what service providers talk about with partnerships. We don't want it to be lip service anymore. We want to be at the table.

In order to do that, I think what has to be acknowledged first is that as an aboriginal woman—I'll speak for myself now—I was born into systemic racism. It was there, and it's still there, so when I hear a bunch of things that my sisters have said--and I will address them because I know I have a short period of time.... There are still a lot of systemic services that benefit service providers, which aboriginal people then become dependent on.

When we become dependent, what do we lose? We lose our autonomy, and then governments and service providers get to say, “But we're doing it for your own good”. Or if they want to open up something like child-family circles or something, where we can do something in the community, it's all under their cultural frameworks. They're not acknowledging.... Like our president of NWT, Terry Villeneuve, said, we have wellness practices, and those need to be recognized just as much as some of the social services or legal traditions, and they must start becoming mandatory, because they work for us.

Also, we must have ethical funding. We'll start getting funding like Sisters in Spirit. It works great, right? The government grabbed it, ran away, took it away and called it their own. Yet there is more work that needs to be done.

I'd love to talk more on this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you. You'll get that opportunity during the question and answer segments, Sandra.

Now we will move into questions and answers. The first segment is seven minutes for questions and for answers. I will have to be very strict with you, because that stew and bannock is waiting, right? We have to leave here at 12. We have timeframes that we're working in when moving from place to place.

Ms. Neville, for the Liberals.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thanks to all of you for appearing.

I have so many questions and so little time, but I'm first up, Arlene, so would you like to make your recommendations that you didn't have time to do?

[Arlene Hache]

Yes, I didn't have time.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

But can you do it quickly? I have a lot of other questions.

[Arlene Hache]

I'll make it short. One is that I think there needs to be funding for family support services, because addressing violence is not all about shelters and not all about the court.

The other one is that down south the bands have band reps to represent children in court, because they're band members and they have a stake in what happens. In the north, that doesn't exist. There is no representative who goes to court to say, “We have a stake in what happens”.

The other thing that I think we need is federally established standards--that has been lost over the years--along with a gender analysis. I think it's critical that funding is available for aboriginal and Inuit women to have a voice, because it is often silence by collaborations. Collaborations are great unless you have to toe the party line. You guys know better than anyone else how disempowering that can be—not always, but it can be.

There were only two other things that I had thought about. One was having equalized financial support. In Yellowknife, for example, parents who have to feed their children get $4.50 a day to feed them. Foster parents get $25 a day—that's minimum—and I think inmates get more than parents are getting to feed their children. So we need a real federal effort around equalizing or some rationale around why children, who are the most important, would get different benefits depending on where they're sitting.

The final thing that I think would make a massive difference is to make sure that we have trauma-informed programs that are culturally relevant. From my perspective of working in the north for 30 years, we have a population that has been convinced there is no problem systemically. They've been convinced that they're drunks who just sort of can't manage. I remember that years ago the only treatment available to them was addiction treatment, because it was all about drunks. And that's not what I see. I think culturally relevant and trauma-informed programs that acknowledge the colonization that took place, and the ongoing oppression, would change the world in aboriginal and Inuit communities.

Thank you.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Fuller, I don't know whether you or someone else in the previous panel raised the issue of elder abuse. You talked about older women coming in with broken bones and whatever. Could you talk about it a bit more? When women are coming in at 60 and 70 years old, abused and beaten up, has that been the pattern of their life for the most part? Can you generalize?

You're nodding, Arlene.

[Lyda Fuller]

Yes.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Always? So have they lived their lives like that? And what should we, as the federal government, be doing?

[Lyda Fuller]

They have lived their lives like that. Once again, I would urge community development, healing programs, and housing.

We just had an elder abuse conference here in Yellowknife for across the territory, and a study has been done on a survey of elder abuse, which is significant across the north. There are now groups working on how to assist elders at the community level. I think that project is federally funded.

So certainly, investing in allowing people to come together, look at solutions, and develop solutions at the community level is important, but adequate healing, adequate development at the community level, and housing seem to me to be keys.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Do I have more time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have a minute and a half.