Status of Women committee  Actually, the one thing that would be a big help is developing real relationships and partnerships with the Métis community to help come up with solutions, because Métis people are a very proud people. They never like to be perceived as needing to be taken care of. In fact, you'll find that we're quite stubborn and arrogant about it.

Status of Women committee  Labour market development. The aboriginal and human resource development agreements have been in our communities for a long time. I can't tell you about the other communities, but in the Métis community more women than men have accessed those resources, so they have provided a tremendous amount of support toward getting women some education.

Status of Women committee  First off, I'd have to answer by telling you this: I don't know that they're different from the rural. I'm not sure what the stats are for the rural, but I know that of the urban ones who were statistically studied, 42% were lone-parent families. In our culture, there's a real value placed on life, on who we are, and...we have nothing to analyze statistically for this, but it is my belief, just being a part of my community for as long as I have been, that young women in our communities who may get pregnant at a very young age do not get rid of their babies.

Status of Women committee  I want to be really clear. It's not that one is better than the other or anything like that, but they are different. Many of the first nations women, other than in maybe the past two decades, have come from reserve communities where there were structures in place and homes in place and things that were available to them that have never been available to the Métis women.

Status of Women committee  In our Métis communities there are a few social housing programs. The waiting lists for most of them are five to six years long. And housing is a major issue for Métis, especially Métis women. I come from Alberta. Housing is actually at a crisis level. You couldn't buy a house if you had $1 million in the bank on most good days in Alberta, and I'm not kidding.

Status of Women committee  I want to tell you that as far as lone-parent families go, child care is a really important issue. In many of our communities, and I've heard this right across our homeland, it's advisable that if you're planning to have children, prior to even getting pregnant you should put your name into a day care so that you can have a day care spot when your child is 18 months old.

Status of Women committee  I wouldn't be able to give you that statistically. That is one of those things they have never tracked for us. I don't think many of the statistics we compare to the first nations.... I believe there's a higher rate of lower education, suicide, FASD, and those issues. We work on those issues, but we don't actually have stats.

Status of Women committee  I don't have that here. I'm sorry.

Status of Women committee  Actually, all I know is that the only way we're going to develop economic security for Métis women is to start, even when they're young women, and work with them to help them understand the ways of how to live. They should be able to collect and gather in their way so that they can save for economic security when they have children.

Status of Women committee  I would say that there has been no government funding or support. We do work with the Northern Alberta Alliance on Race Relations to try to create awareness around racism. We work with young people to try to change the attitudes when they're young, so they don't always perceive us as the drunken guy in the gutter.

Status of Women committee  First off, traditionally and historically, Métis women were always workers in the home. They were always a provider of an economic source in their home for many, many generations. That's a reality of who we were. We were a very matriarchal society. Very often, the men would leave our communities for months, and sometimes years, and the women would take care of all the necessary things that would provide for their well-being and their existence in that community.

Status of Women committee  For us and Métis, Michif is our national language. It is one of the languages that is being lost and could possibly become extinct, because there are fewer and fewer Michif speakers all the time. Our language is a part of our culture; that's what makes us who we are. Our language is a living language; it's a language made up of verbs.

Status of Women committee  We actually have been working with Stats Canada to try to pull out whatever stats they have from their available sources. But one of the issues that happens with Métis people—an issue that we like to call the “Métis identifier”, because of a lack of a proper term for it—is that we don't know what health services are missing or what health services aren't being resourced, because nobody will ask if you're Métis.

Status of Women committee  There are things that we do to work on issues like that. Actually, I have to tell you, from a national level, that most of these things happen at the regional or provincial levels. For instance, I come from Alberta, so I can speak about the things there that I really know well. We sit on the chief of police's hate crimes committee, which helps develop awareness so that we can let our people know how they can access the things they need when a hate crime is perpetuated against them.

Status of Women committee  Status of Women has not been all that receptive or open to Métis women, only because there has been a program through the Department of Canadian Heritage that just this coming year is going over to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development--the aboriginal women's program.