[Witness spoke in Michif Cree as follows:]
Tân’si Gabrielle nisihkâson, Packechawanis ochi niya,
[Michif Cree text translated as follows:]
Hello, my name is Gabrielle and I am from Packechawanis.
[English]
Hi, everyone. My name is Gabrielle Fayant. I'm the co-founder and a helper with the Assembly of Seven Generations.
I do want to also add a trigger warning. The realities of indigenous women and girls are very harsh. I wanted to put that out there.
I am the câpân of a great-grandmother who survived sexual violence and multiple forms of gender-based violence. I'm the granddaughter of a woman who was a product of sexual violence. I am the niece of an auntie who was murdered. I'm half-sister to a young woman who was stalked and murdered. I'm a friend of a woman whose remains were found in a condemned building in Ottawa. I am a community member to six indigenous women who died by suicide or were murdered in the last two months in the city of Ottawa.
I want it to be clear that the endemic gender-based violence and extreme overrepresentation of sexual violence and death experienced by indigenous women, girls and two-spirit folks are not isolated and stem back several generations. It's not just me who experiences this. Unfortunately, this is something that many indigenous women have in our families and within our communities.
This violence is directly linked to the systemic injustices within Canadian governments, which are at times intentional or willful blindness, but ultimately target those with the least privilege in this society.
Along with the threat of MMIWG2s+, indigenous women, girls and two-spirit folks continue to suffer from the intergenerational impacts of genocide via residential schools, from being overrepresented in the child welfare system, from being heavily targeted by police brutality and from being overrepresented in the criminal justice system, to name a few. These injustices are the biggest threat to the well-being of indigenous peoples. It would be an understatement to say that the mental health and well-being of indigenous women and girls is in a dire state.
Indigenous communities know the solutions to support and improve the lives of the youth that they work with. However, services for indigenous youth are also extremely underfunded or not funded at all, extremely limited, and often do not offer an intersectional approach to the multi-layered needs of indigenous peoples. We've seen large investments from governments to indigenous initiatives under the name of reconciliation. However, most are not in response to the calls to action that survivors made and, furthermore, are not getting to the ground where they are needed most.
To speak to these points, I want to talk about the struggles we experience with our youth organization, Assembly of Seven Generations. A7G is an indigenous-led non-profit located here in the traditional territory of the Algonquin peoples, specifically in Ottawa.
Every week, we serve 20 to 30 indigenous youth through a weekly drop-in. We do crisis interventions, suicide interventions, mental health supports, homelessness interventions, system navigation and street patrols to locate missing indigenous girls. We also do workshops, special events and activities from beading circles to feasts, round dances and land-based activities.
We do all of this with no core funding, no staff or salary capacity, no benefits, no time off, no secured facility and no land base to operate from. The caseload grows and grows to the point where we've had to close our door to new youth.
Over the last few years, we've been organizing with other indigenous youth groups, collectives and organizations across the country. We now have proof that these experiences are systemic. Over 10 indigenous youth groups have shared their stories with us from across Canada. Every group we talk to had an eerily similar experience with a lack of funding, lack of capacity and resources, and an overwhelming need to be a safety net for youth who fall between the cracks within the current systems that are in place.
Youth leaders are struggling to keep up with the demand to continue to hold things together because they know that if they're not there, they're the last resort for young people in their communities. Despite having funding or not, they have to keep doing the work.
Furthermore, the young people leading these life-saving groups and organizations are all indigenous women and girls themselves.
I do not have all the solutions for these enormous systemic problems, but I do know that community-based supports for young people, as outlined in TRC call to action 66, do work. However, we cannot continue to do this work on microgrants and unsustainable funding. It's leading to severe burnout, and without these youth groups in place, people are dying—and that's not an exaggeration at all. We've seen it within the last two months just here in Ottawa.
Meegwetch.