I won't go into my introductions. I have to say that everybody here in the north is completely disheartened with the state of our community university. I held my post at Laurentian from 1994 to 2010, so I've been witness to several successes of our community-led and community-driven institution.
As a status Indian, if you will, we've had.... I heard our previous witnesses speak about the mandate of Laurentian University having indigenous, francophone and anglophone affairs, but in fact that tri-cultural mandate began with us as indigenous people. Just so you're aware, I do not like the term “indigenous”. I am Anishinabe, and this is Anishinabe territory.
We were very adamant about making Laurentian University a tri-cultural university and honouring the original people of this territory. We had to fight extremely hard to make that a reality.
As you can see, I am uncertain as to why the state of affairs at Laurentian has gotten to where it has. As an indigenous woman, as an anishinaabekwe, we are consistently under a microscope of accountability. We have to identify to the cent every penny that we spend, with full detail. To allow the university, an institution that is run systemically, to have such disgraceful unaccountability is just beyond somebody of my stature when it comes to leading Anishinabe affairs in this community. We have to continuously write 60-plus pages of proposals, whether it's the provincial government or the federal government, to identify simple access to services for indigenous people in this country that you now call Canada. For simple $60,000 requests, it's 60 pages to identify and prove why we require these services.
I'm going to stop about the disgrace of the university and the fact that both provincial and federal governments allowed this to happen the way it did. I think everybody has accountability.
I want to talk about the inequities of the north and the south that continue to happen to this day. I'll speak from many different lenses, first, obviously, as an Anishinabe woman, and second as a citizen in these territories. I will not get into a disagreement with the northeast and the northwest. That happened many moons ago, when we established the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. I'll speak directly to midwifery in just a moment, because I have several recommendations.
I'm a grandmother of five. We have always accessed midwifery. Prior to colonial practice and colonization and Canadian and Crown policy, we depended solely on our midwives. Our indigenous midwifery is a time immemorial practice and has been honoured and respected to this day. Obviously, with Crown policy and practices like the Indian residential schools...and even today that hasn't disappeared. It has just evolved into child welfare systems. Everybody needs to take a hard look at that, because they're still taking our children.
Prior to any of that contact, our midwifery was absolutely honoured. This was the fact of our life. This was our cycle of life. Without our midwives, we wouldn't exist in the harsh terrains that we once resided in. I'm a huge supporter of midwifery. In fact, with the Shkagamik-Kwe Health Centre, we are one of 10 aboriginal health access centres in the province of Ontario and the only one of their kind in what you now call Canada.
In the last decade, we strived to negotiate with the province and established a very reciprocal, respectful relationship to ensure that it's a partnership and we don't have the province dictating to us on what has to be and what can't be. We work together to find resolve. We have now expanded our sector to approximately 28. That includes the aboriginal health access centres, aboriginal community health centres and now the indigenous interprofessional primary health care teams, along with indigenous family health teams and aboriginal midwifery.
The 10 AHACs were a pilot—
