I'll go first.
Our spirituality is our life. When we fall apart, when we fall down from being away from home and being situated in another diverse ethnic group such as white people, we spend so much time with you that sometimes our spirit will tell us we're having a hard time, so we have to go home. What that person did on the ship was the right thing to do, because it set him straight.
We listen to our elders and the Creator through our ceremonies. Our ceremonies are great for us. They help us and they benefit us, but they also tell us that we have a long way to go, that nothing is just taken care of right away. The medicines we use are from the land. The way we get them, we have to be so humble and free of all alcohol and drugs. For a veteran it's very hard to let go, because the PTSD could be so severe that those are what they need to help move on with life, so we go to you guys and try to go your way.
Then we come back to our way of life later on so that we can actually move forward again as human beings. That's who we are in this life. We are human beings, and we have tried our best to be humble, but with racism and everything else and the atrocities against our people, it's very hard to actually look back and to try to bring that forward.
Without an apology from the Canadian Armed Forces for what they've done to our people as veterans, for the sacrifices that they have made, and for the ones who died overseas and are buried there, we still have time to remember them and bring them forward. Only Veterans Affairs can actually do this. We can't, because you're the ones who did this to us. If you need help, we will give it to you, but you're the ones who actually have to do this public apology to our people. It would benefit us all in the long run because our people would want to be warriors again. We did have a lot of warriors before contact.