When we talk about gender equality in sport, we're not looking at just the big picture of what we see on TV and stuff like that. It's also about grassroots equal opportunity. It's about the same opportunities for boys, girls and LGBTQIA2+. It's that they have the opportunity to even try for sport.
When we come from an indigenous perspective, we're also looking at the multiple barriers for indigenous people in sport, including poverty and distance, and we have to acknowledge the Far North. Most of those opportunities come to boys and men, not to women. We need to look at more investments in those who are further away from sports in their lives, who are placed further away by poverty, by nutrition and by all those basic things that are common in mainstream populations but not when it comes to indigenous peoples.
When we talk about gender equality, we're looking at a bigger picture: equal opportunity for boys, girls and all the different communities around that and what it could look like in the future. That could be absolutely beautiful, right? We recently attended the national aboriginal hockey championships. There is equal representation there between men and women. That's from our own community putting those youth forward to have those opportunities, but it takes the whole community and a national effort to do it.
We get equality in those places, but we don't get it at the grassroots level. That's where we need to look deeper: at the grassroots at home in our backyards and also targeting both women and girls.