Mr. Speaker, first of all, I just want to thank the member for Timmins—James Bay and the seconder of the motion, the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, for putting this very important discussion on the floor for us today.
One of the most compelling realities across this country is how many indigenous communities address the issue of residential schools. In the area where I live, there is a community, Homalco First Nation, that traditionally comes from the Campbell River territory all the way up to Bute Inlet. A long time ago, they had a community in Bute Inlet they called Church House. The Homalco were losing their children. Their children were being taken away to residential schools. What the community did was come together to raise money. They raised money and built, in their community, a church and a school. Because they built a church and a school, they were able to have their children at home until grade six. The priests and the nuns came right into the community. They lived in the community, and there are some good memories of that. Sadly, there are also some very unfortunate and sad memories of that time.
One of the realities we forget is that indigenous communities were incredibly strong in how they dealt with this. Earlier one of the members talked about people coming home broken, and that is true. I could name people from my community and from the communities I represent who came home broken because of residential schools.
I just want to remind everyone here that they also found ways to survive and to thrive. The reality that indigenous people are still so strong is because of the strength they had. I want to recognize this.
We are inviting the Pope to come forward and do the right thing, which is apologize to all the children, families, and communities that were immensely impacted by their decision to work with the government to do that job. It was a very direct job. The job was to take the Indian out of the child.
In one of the schools in the riding I represent, a middle school called Southgate, there is a mask called “taking the Indian from the child”. It has a mask on the outside. It is a transformation mask. If anyone does not understand what that means, I am happy to share it with them. It is a way of showing a story. It has a white face that opens up to reveal the Indian child inside.
I know that my time is up. I just want to recognize the resilience of the indigenous communities of this country.