Thank you so much for your question. It's something that we talk about internationally when we compare at the UN and the Inter-American Commission but also amongst women on the ground. I think one of the biggest things is for action to actually be taken on all of the ongoing violence and exploitation.
It's one of those things that happen right in plain sight. You have human trafficking happening at truck stops near the man camps. You have it happening just outside the man camps and sometimes inside the man camps. Everybody knows about it. Police know about it. The managers know about it. It doesn't ever get addressed. There seems to be this barrier to want to address this for indigenous women and girls.
The other thing is to look at what hasn't worked. There have been a million recommendations that say that they just need cultural awareness or gender sensitivity training, but the problem has never been our culture. The problem is violent sexual crimes and violent human trafficking crimes. How do you have zero tolerance for these violent criminal acts that are happening—with the RCMP, corporate actors, state actors or private actors—when there's no follow-up or investigation? There's no real prosecution. They all do it with relative impunity.
I think we really need to look at anything where you can check a box—you know, a community initiative or a donation to a powwow. All of those things should be happening anyway, as partnerships, but the failure to address the ongoing and right out in the open violence that's happening, that's what seems to elude everybody. They want to pick around the edges and not really address the problem.