Thank you, Madam Chair.
There will not be time to go through the PowerPoint presentation, but I want to get to the videos very quickly. We won't be able to watch all of them. I was unaware of the seven-minute time allocation.
Let's start with the Eric Shirt video. He's from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation.
[Video presentation]
I'm cutting that short. You have the point.
[Video presentation]
I hope you have the opportunity to watch these videos in full length.
These are voices from the first nation community. There's a cultural continuity in the sense that first nations people have always lived in community.
One of my heroes is a man by the name of Wendell Berry, who wrote a lot of essays. In the book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, he said the following about the role and power of community—and think about this in relation to indigenous women, including women 55 years of age and older, living on reserve:
Community alone, as principle and as fact, can raise the standards of local health (ecological, economic, social, and spiritual) without which the other two interests [public and private] will destroy each other.
With regard to community, I would say that the greatest challenges facing indigenous senior women 55 years of age and older are poverty, inequality, toxic stress from unhealed historic trauma that's been transmitted intergenerationally, adverse childhood experiences—and I'm sure you've heard of the ACE study—and trauma-based behaviours when that trauma isn't healed. “You hurt me; I hurt you. You attack me; I attack you.” These are mimetic structures of violence that are very alive and very real, and frankly, they operate here in Ottawa. I was here last night, and I witnessed Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony.
I would also say that in addition to those three—inequality, poverty, toxic stress—there's ongoing structural violence by the state, Canada's failure to ensure equal protection and equal benefit of the law for indigenous members, especially age-vulnerable women, and that includes senior women.
I'd like you to put up the slide of my stepdaughter, Deborah Serafinchon. Deborah is the daughter of my late husband, Walter Twinn, who was chief of the Sawridge First Nation and a senator. You see that she's in a wheelchair. She exemplifies “55 years of age and older”. Both her mother and her father came from Sawridge First Nation, but because of the operation of the Indian Act, Deborah—