Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women committee  Good. Thank you. I want to ask the national chief to respond to the issue on CJ Fowler first, and then I'll follow up with a response on the urban and the first nation community shelters.

Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women committee  Thank you, National Chief. Thank you for the invitation to be here tonight. In coming to the committee, I was thinking that we may be concerned about what's happened in the past, but the national chief is correct that we do respond on a weekly basis to cases of missing or murdered women across the country.

Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women committee  I come from a community where we've enjoyed at least 30 years of sobriety, and we know that the alcohol and drug abuse were just symptoms of deeper problems. We needed to get to the root causes of why our people were drugging and drinking in the first place. We had the opportunity over the last 30 years to develop community-based programs that would allow us to create a safe space to deal with violence against women, the sexual abuse that happened in residential schools, and what we in turn perpetrated among each other within the community—the sexual abuse, the incest within our communities.