[Witness spoke in Anishinaabemowin as follows:]
Kwe kakina.
[Anishinaabemowin text translated as follows:]
Hello everyone.
[English]
My name is Jennifer Brazeau. I'm the executive director of the Lanaudière Native Friendship Centre. I'm here today representing the Regroupement des centres d'amitié autochtone du Québec, which is a provincial association that has campaigned for more than 45 years for the defence of rights and interests of indigenous people in the urban centres, as well as supporting indigenous friendship centres in Quebec in frontline service delivery.
Across the province of Quebec, there are 10 friendship centres and one service centre. These friendship centres are there to serve indigenous people living or passing through urban centres in Chibougamau, Joliette, La Tuque, Maniwaki, Val-d'Or, Montréal, Québec, Senneterre, Sept-Îles, Trois-Rivières and its point of service in Shawinigan.
At the national level, I also represent the province of Quebec at the National Association of Friendship Centres as a board member. Just so that you know, there are over 100 friendship centres across the country that are also serving indigenous people living in urban centres. The RCAAQ and the NAFC are recognized as being the largest urban service infrastructure for indigenous people.
The friendship centre movement has been working for several decades to support indigenous people in order to improve their quality of life. We also support indigenous people navigating through various systems put in place by the government by being corridors of services between our friendship centres and the public services in each of our regions. When the system has failed our indigenous people in our urban centres, the friendship centres are there for our people. We're there to offer them support, but, above all, we're also there to offer them a space that is safe and free from judgment.
Over the past decades, the RCAAQ has been a witness and has participated in several commissions and inquiries, parliamentary commissions, reports, testimonies and the development of recommendations and calls to action. We have proposed innovative solutions to issues brought forth by the government and by the population and by our members. We have worked hard, without denying our history, without erasing the trauma that our members have been living, and, above all, without forgetting the tragedies that are happening presently, even in 2022.
We will never forget. That's why we want to break the cycle of indifference and violence by offering concrete actions and solutions for indigenous people, and also through partnerships throughout our networks. Several decades of the status quo faced by indigenous people have left a chronic existence of a cultural barrier that has devastating effects on our people. We all know there are higher rates of criminalization and higher rates of victimization. We have individual and collective rights of indigenous people that are not being respected, and indigenous women are often at the forefront living this colonial violence.
I can continue and keep talking about the statistics of the violence that indigenous women are facing. You're going to have other experts who are going to come to bring that to you. But what I want to be able to talk to you about is how this violence is rooted in the Canadian culture of genocide through the exploitation of our territories, and how that reflects on how indigenous women view themselves and how their own bodies are being exploited by the systems that are put in place through systemic racism, through the continued displacement of indigenous people from their territories, through the rupture in being able to practise our cultural activities on our own territories, through the exploitation of mining companies that are well overrepresented in Canada. We need to be able to take a moment to pause and to question why we have so many extractive companies within our country. Is it something that's rooted systemically in how Canadians exploit our territories? But then we also send those companies to other countries, where they continue that exploitation and those systems of abuse and trauma in other countries.
I think it's important for us to note that, as indigenous women, when we witness these companies coming in destroying our natural areas, which we have a strong cultural connection to, where they're exploiting the nature around us, it has a severe impact on indigenous women because then we ourselves, our own bodies, become exploited, too. When you have companies that come in, you have a rise in violence that's associated with fly-in and fly-out. You have indigenous women who then flee those communities to be able to try to find safer spaces in the cities, and then who, through maybe self-medication, will end up having to use their own bodies to be able to pay for their own services.
Thank you.