Madam Speaker,
[Editor's Note: Member spoke in Inuktitut]
Listening to the two members from the Reform Party one would think we were invading and taking over the land they have always occupied.
After listening to what they are saying it seems we are going in as aboriginal people and saying that they should excuse us but we are taking over the land. They never quite point out that the people they are talking about, the Sahtu, whose land claims we are discussing today, have been in that neighbourhood for 36,000 years.
One would think after listening to the previous speaker-I will get to the question-that the aboriginal people were just there to invite the Government of Canada to take over our land and say it is all yours. It was not quite like that. There were losses imposed whether it was renewable wildlife loss, or social loss like custom adoption or mission schools that were imposed on the aboriginal people.
We did not ask for any of that. We did not ask for a lot. Somebody told us that we could not hunt geese in the springtime which we have always done. We could not hunt muskox or whales any more because they were almost extinct because some hunters and whalers came along and hunted all the muskoxen, whales, and whatever else.
The member talked about mosquito infested areas and the hardships that his grandparents went through. We think it is a beautiful land. We do not talk about the mosquitoes infesting the land or cold and hardships. It is our land. We like it. It does not matter whether there are 10 million mosquitoes around. It is a beautiful land. We do not describe it as mosquito infested or cold and harsh.
The attitude of people like the member who just spoke and the other Reform member who spoke earlier, I repeat, is unbelievable. We are not asking him to accept the guilt. All we are doing through this legislation is trying to right the wrongs that were done to the aboriginal people of that area, in this case, the Sahtu. Words fail me because it is too unbelievable to even contemplate the attitude of the Reform Party.
I would ask a couple of questions. If we look back far enough, we will find that the lands that were occupied for the last 30,000 years were occupied by the Dene. If the member wants to trace his history in that area, he would go back no more than a couple hundred years, if that far.
Should there not be some justification in settling a claim with the people who have occupied that land and who can trace back their occupation in tens of thousands of years? Second, would he not agree that the right thing to do would be to recognize the aboriginal people's inherent right of self-government and that the aboriginal people deserve to have that recognition?