Thank you very much. Bonjour. [Witness speaks in Blackfoot]
My name is Denise Peterson and I am speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Blackfoot people of Treaty 7. For the past 35 years I've worked as a teacher, principal, and education consultant, and though I am a councillor with the Town of Strathmore, my role here today is as a teacher, principal, and education consultant who is focused on working with young parenting women from the Siksika/Blackfoot nation in southern Alberta. My expertise relates to community-based matters, so that is what I am emphasizing today.
I also want to say that I don't speak for the Siksika, but only in relation to what my time with them has revealed to me regarding the matters before us today. I've opted to speak specifically on indigenous women's access to the justice system and appropriate legal services within our community, particularly as they relate to the very vulnerable population with whom we work.
The judicial matters most commonly having a negative impact on my students relate to the issues such as child custody and support, and being the victim of abuse and assault. My students are most often young women with infants, who must file court documents to access sustainable funding in order to live or to attend school. Often, or most always, they are afraid to do so. In the tightly knit community where they reside, such a simple thing as filing a document to ensure parental financial responsibility often has cataclysmic results. Access to legal aid is nonexistent in such cases, and no support workers are in place to assist.
The pressures of living in a small community impact the capacity and willingness of our students to act on their own behalf. In instances of abuse and assault, the young women who are victims do not have straightforward access to legal services. While victim services organizations exist in these small communities, both on and off reserve, my students regularly voice valid concerns that relatives of the perpetrator's family may be working for the agency. Beyond that concern, if they file charges, repercussions are possible, as we've witnessed far too often.
The committee is looking for recommendations on how to improve indigenous women's experience within the federal justice and correctional systems. In consultation with my community, with my students, and with experts and knowledge keepers, we believe it's important to improve access to legal representation and to ease the process by transferring matters before the court to other venues. We believe it's important to work with other service providers to streamline processes for filing the documents necessary to access student aid and social assistance, and to formally recognize restorative justice in practice as a survival mechanism for resolving matters currently brought before the court. Most importantly, we believe that we need to devise a community court system.
We need to change not only the specific structure of our justice system but also the way people think about justice, and from my perspective, of course, education would obviously be a key. We believe, of course, that there are historical systemic issues, and the previous speaker spoke to them more than adequately. Indigenous students perceive the justice system as a place of punishment, where most often they get lost. It is for this reason that we are such a strong supporter of community courts. Having a crown who is willing to work with the defence to come up with strategic plans and support systems for the accused is probably the most impactful system of support that we have seen. If my community could have this in place, lives and the communities would change.
When my young indigenous students are before the court, very few consider the reasons why they ended up there in the first place. The justice system functions in such a way that only looks at what was done. When it does look at the why factor, it's most often in relation to sentencing and rarely in relation to prevention. Community courts aim to tackle issues of poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, and displacement by identifying the systemic issues that led to the young women being in court, and then setting them up with community supports that can assist them in resolution and restoration.
Utilizing indigenous ways of knowing to build a comprehensive community court process would work. We know that if our government truly believes that the function of the justice system is to focus on prevention, rehabilitation and healing, there need to be major changes in the way our court system works. We need community courts and not just pilot projects. The first step that we need to take is to clearly identify what we believe the intended purpose of the justice system is and what functions it has in our society. If we truly believe that the correct approach is to focus on healing and prevention, my belief is that community courts directed and guided by indigenous community knowledge keepers and experts are the very best option.
Here I reference Roberta Jamieson, and end this by saying emphatically that in our Siksika community we know that our indigenous people possess all the capacity and every requisite element necessary to create and implement community court systems that are a reflection of their proven competency and wisdom. Furthermore, we know they require encouragement, support, and respect as they speak their truth to power.
I want to thank this committee for the opportunity to speak before you, and I really look forward to the outcomes. I thank all the other speakers for the education they've been able to offer me. It's much appreciated. Thank you.