:
Good morning, everyone.
I'm going to call the meeting to order.
I want to thank our witnesses for coming.
We are not travelling with the whole committee, only some members, because when you travel when the House is sitting, people are required to be in the House. Quite often people travel with a smaller committee than normal, so what you see here is a representative committee of the four parties in the House.
I know you were told you have 10 minutes to present, but I'm going to propose something to you. If you disagree, that's fine, we'll do a 10-minute thing, but if you don't, we can do it the other way. I thought what might be better, instead of conducting this as a very formal meeting, with seven minutes for questions and five minutes for questions, is to do it more as a round table, so there is a better interaction and an ability for people to talk to each other, as opposed to presenting something stiffly and then somebody asks you specific questions that we can bounce back and forth.
Have you all got written texts? You have. And how long are they? Eight minutes? I was hoping I could give each one of you about three minutes to introduce yourselves, to tell me what you do and what you think the issues are that you want to bring to the table.
We're studying the issue of violence and aboriginal women. We want to talk about the root causes of violence. And when we say “violence”, we want to talk about the scope, meaning not just sexual or physical or psychological or systemic violence. Discrimination is a form of violence, stigma, all those kinds of things constitute violence writ large. Then we want to talk about the forms, what forms you believe that violence takes.
So we want to go into this in a different kind of way than just saying here is violence against women, and it's obviously got be something you see--a black eye, that's violence.
We want to talk about it, and then about its impact on aboriginal women and their ability to survive and to function well in society, and then what you think.
We've talked about this for the longest time. Everyone knows this issue has been talked to death. Sisters In Spirit have been doing work on it, commissions have done work on it, but it seems as if it is so pervasive that it is not something anyone seems to have been able to deal with.
We want to look at this from a perspective in which you can give us some recommendations about what the Government of Canada, which cannot fix things, can do that will help to facilitate...if there's legislation, if you think there are things we can do within the federal jurisdiction, if you think things should be done differently from the way they've been done. I want you to be creative, and be as frank as you possibly can and tell us what you really think.
That's what I'm proposing to you, that you each do that for three minutes, if you agree, and then I will have everybody on the committee introduce themselves just for a minute—we don't want parliamentarians to talk too much, you know how we have a tendency to do that; we just want them to just say who they are and what they do, and then we will begin to get to the meat of the thing.
How do you feel about that, or would you just like to do your thing?
All right. Thank you very much.
I'll start with Pamela Shauk from the Native Friendship Centre of Montreal.
Pamela.
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My name is Ellen Gabriel, and I have been the president of the Quebec Native Women's Association since 2004. I am from the community of Kanesatake, a Mohawk community that experienced first-hand violence from the Canadian government during the Oka crisis.
I am an artist and have been an activist for the last 20 years. We like to look at the work we're doing in Quebec Native Women in a holistic way, in terms of how we can make solutions for our community. So we need to include the impact that colonization has had in not just how our communities function or don't function properly, but also how legislation that is currently in discussion in Parliament, proposed by the Conservative government, is just a patchwork remedy of changing the Indian Act. At the end of the day, the Indian Act will still exist. We have been lobbying hard for many years, since the Sisters in Spirit research initiative was created, demanding from the government, along with our colleagues at Amnesty International, a national plan of action so that we can look at the kinds of needs that must be addressed for families, children, and communities to overcome this sad part in our history as aboriginal people that shows no sign of decreasing.
We also call upon the police to implement the 2006 protocol, the chiefs of police protocol, where they recognize that there needs to be a specific mechanism for police to respond to not just murdered or missing aboriginal women but also violence. I think the police within the reserves are not adequately trained to deal with domestic violence, sexual violence, or murdered or missing aboriginal women. So there is a huge gap in how our communities are able, just in human resources, to respond to these grave issues.
I think colonization is a major factor in shaping violence against aboriginal women. Amnesty's 2004 report stated that long-standing stereotypes and prejudices in Canadian society have fostered widespread and brutal acts of violence against aboriginal women. This is compounded by government policy and dispossession of indigenous people's land, resources, and territory. They've suffered impoverishment, with the loss of ties to family and community.
In spite of the June 11 apology for the residential school system, there has been no indication from this present government that there is any kind of healthy reconciliation happening in the community to undo those negative impacts that the residential school system had upon aboriginal children, who later, when they became adults, tried to raise families based upon their experiences.
When you have the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is this expectant result from government that, within x amount of time, all should be well.
How can you undo over 100 years of colonization, oppression, and legislation that has been embedded in the psyche of our people? It takes time. It also takes support, honesty, and goodwill from the government to be able to support the communities.
It's not just a matter of money; it's a matter of education. I think one of the things that is sorely lacking in trying to address this issue is the lack of education in government in how colonization has affected aboriginal communities and how it continues to affect aboriginal people in our communities.
We need to think of changing the future for the children who exist today so they will not have to endure any more colonized, oppressive policies under the Indian Act. We have asked for the full endorsement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Our languages have suffered; our sexuality has suffered; our identity as human beings, I believe, has suffered.
There has been no adequate consultation or accommodation to our needs in any kind of engagement sessions the government has conducted in the last four years of its existence.
I'll stop there, because I know there's more discussion to take place.
Thank you.
:
Good morning, everyone. Thank you again for your invitation.
We are pleased to be presenting to you the work that Amnesty International has done since 2004 on violence against women. My name is Béatrice Vaugrante, and I am Executive Director of the Canada francophone section of Amnesty International.
Since 2004, we have been documenting the situation regarding violence against women in cooperation with our partners in the aboriginal groups representing women in Canada and Quebec. Since 2004, we have been calling for a comprehensive national action plan to combat violence against women.
We hail last March's announcement of the actions that were to be taken. However, we fear that there has been a somewhat reduced reading of the violence that is committed against women, a reading that is restricted to the criminal problem related to the terribly high crime rate and the number of women who are assassinated or disappeared. Since we've been documenting this issue and conducting research on these matters, we have believed that the problems are not merely criminal, but that they are rooted in violations of economic, social and cultural rights of aboriginal women. We're talking about health, we're talking about education, we're talking about housing. There is chronic under-funding of services offered to women, which constitutes other discrimination compared to what is found in non-aboriginal populations.
There are obviously short-term solutions regarding the police and protocols, which would make it possible to conduct better searches. That could be discussed in cooperation with the Association des policières et policiers provinciaux du Québec, which, since 2006, has acknowledged the high rate of crime and the need for a protocol. I especially believe that there are a lot of long-term solutions respecting economic and social rights and under-funding. An effort really must be made to examine how this discriminates against aboriginal women.
In my opinion, cancelling the Kelowna accords has done them a lot of harm. We must obviously endorse, support and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples together with aboriginal groups. We are talking about deeply rooted problems that will take time to solve.
There is the historic multi-generational trauma of the residential schools and the high child placement rate. Today, that rate is three times higher than at the peak of residential school era. Yes, there is violence, yes there are deplorable living conditions, and the children must be protected, but that has a terrible impact on the communities and culture, on their cultural fabric, on the fabric of the community. It is unacceptable for people to place their children. Women will even refuse to report violence so they do not lose their children. We cannot accept that in Canada.
There is also the denigration of the status of women, languages and institutions, the seizure of lands and the failure to conduct consultations on their lands and resources. These are complex, complicated substantive issues, but they must be addressed.
Thank you.
:
Good afternoon. My name is Émilie-Cloé Laliberté, and I'm the general coordinator of the Stella organization.
Stella was founded in 1995. It's the only organization in Montreal created by and for sex workers. We do an enormous amount of work in the field of health and violence prevention, from an empowerment and harm reduction perspective We offer a medical clinic; we have street workers who go into the field, onto the street, into shooting galleries, to the places where sexual services are exchanged for money, other goods, alcohol or drugs. We have a legal clinic; we also reach out to women in prison. Our partnership with Doctors of the World enables us to take nurses into the street and in the places where there is sex work and substance abuse.
We make contact with a number of people that varies between 4,000 and 6,000 a year. In the past, we had an aboriginal project. Our services to aboriginal sex workers today are incorporated in our street work shifts. Services to aboriginal sex workers are still a priority for Stella. Moreover, we are the only group of sex workers fighting against violence. Stella really cannot talk about the general violence experience by aboriginal women. I believe the groups that are around us today really know the subject better that we do. However, we can talk about our experience in the fight against violence against aboriginal women sex workers.
Fourteen sex workers have been murdered in Quebec since 1990. Four of those victims were aboriginal women. Those incidents teach us a great deal about the lack of appropriate services in the fight against aboriginal street workers and women and about the lack of funding for appropriate services.
Based on our experience, the greatest sources of violence reported by sex workers are spousal abuse and attacks by those who specifically target sex workers. The attackers believe they are protected by a climate of impunity caused in large part by the criminalization and stigmatization of our work.
As regards aboriginal sex workers who are killed in Quebec, who have been mentioned, in at least one of those cases, the attacker was the woman's spouse. In another case, the victim requested help in the moments preceding her death. She was on one of the busiest streets in Montreal, but no one deigned to help her. She approached a bar to which she was denied access because she was a prostitute and drunk.
A number of findings and recommendations were issued following a consultation of aboriginal Stella members. We also consulted existing research and drew on our experience in the field. I don't know whether you want me to give you our recommendations right away or whether a period is set aside for that a little later.
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I think one of the weaknesses in things like the Aboriginal Healing Foundation is that it has a time limit; it has an expiry date. What we need in the communities and for the urban aboriginal people are programs that are recurring.
We also need to get the provinces and territories involved, because they don't contribute anything at all. If we use a clinic, the federal government is the one that pays, and yet the provinces use our territories and resources as well. So we need to get all the crown actors involved to help us create these programs that will be perpetuated, that don't have an expiry date. The inconsistency in creating pilot projects has created more damage than anything, because you get people who are on the road to healing and then we have to say, “I'm sorry, there's no more funding for you.” So they either quit the road to healing or they try to find other ways to deal with it.
One of the things that I think is also problematic is that as long as you have assimilation policies that do not recognize the importance and the preciousness of our languages, we are going to lose traditional knowledge, which is the basis for our health and well-being. We are going to continue to lose people.
I've spoken with a front-line worker who works in the James Bay area, and she said she was experiencing a lot of suicides in their community. She said all of them were related to the residential school system. It has not helped. You can give money to people and say, “I'm sorry this happened to you”, but unless they are actually supported--and in our community, not just in urban areas--we are burning out our social workers, because there's not enough of them. They go to the grocery store and someone comes up to them and says, “By the way, could you help me with this?” We don't have enough human resources, trained people, in our communities.
We have these projects that give certificates and don't provide enough opportunities for people to have.... It doesn't validate it. It just kind of says, “Okay, we'll give you a bit of knowledge to become social workers or police officers, but you're really not equivalent. You can't work anywhere except on the reserve.” Our people are everywhere, and we should be able to have access to those programs.
I can't emphasize enough that the government and all the crown actors have to become involved in the decolonization process. They have to start listening to our needs. They can't just throw a bit of money here and there and say, look at the wonderful things we've done for aboriginal people. The Department of Indian Affairs sucks about 64% to 67% of the money that's allocated for aboriginal people and we're left with crumbs. We have been in the process of trying to get out of the colonization, but we cannot do it if every time there are criteria and policies that restrict our ability and freedom to be able to help our people adequately.
:
I believe that one of the ways of getting over the effects of the residential schools would be to stop perpetuating the phenomenon today. As I said earlier, three times as many children are being placed outside their communities and families today than there were at the peak time of the residential schools.
Social programs are under-funded. Twenty-two per cent fewer child protection services are offered for aboriginal children than for non-aboriginal children. And yet, because they live in remote areas, the costs are higher and, in addition, the needs are much greater. The situation is the same for health and education. There is a systemic factor that doesn't help matters. Some programs are under federal jurisdiction, whereas others are provincial. So there's a lack of coordination between the two orders of government, as a result of which there is now discrimination within a single province.
Furthermore, a case is currently being heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, concerning the under-funding of family services for children. The government claims there is no discrimination, that aboriginal children receive the same amount. It's not right to present these kinds of arguments before the tribunal. In Canada today, no one should discriminate between an aboriginal and a non-aboriginal child. So discrimination must stop. What would make a woman and her family stay together? She would have to have a life with dignity, an income and access to health and education services. In that case as well, no one should think based solely on social programs; you also have to think on the basis of economic independence.
I don't believe these people want to live on charity forever. There are funds and programs, but it's like a band-aid on a cancer. We have to work to find solutions so the communities can manage to become economically independent. The same is true for women, so that they no longer suffer violence. This implies consultation and cooperation when it comes to land use. Whether it's to open a mine, build a dam or establish a forest business, the Supreme Court asks that the local populations be consulted. It's not done without them. People have to stop opposing rights, particularly in the regions.
We conducted a research project of international scope in Wendake, Quebec. In the regions, we sense these things. From the point of view of rights, I very well understand why local workers want to have work and a plant. That's clearly important, but, at the government level, they can't always rely on oppositions, such as when people say that aboriginal people are a burden on them. There has to be work for aboriginals and non-aboriginals. We have to try to find solutions together, through consultation.
Not all aboriginal people want to limit themselves to traditional activities. They also want modern economic development in their communities and economic self-sufficiency that enables them to live in dignity. In view of the fact that 40% of housing units are over-populated, there is necessarily tension within families. However, financial resources and economic self-sufficiency would make it possible to build houses. I believe that would contribute a great deal to reducing violence.
:
I'm more comfortable in English. So I'm going to answer you in English.
[English]
We talk about decolonization, and colonization was also inflicted by the church, and I mean no disrespect to any people who are Christians here. It affected their sexuality. It affected the role of women and the value of women, and equality with men in our communities.
I think what we need within the communities themselves is to educate our own people. It's not just about educating the government; it's also educating our own people, who also practise discrimination legally because of the Indian Act. They can say to a woman, “Well, you married a non-native, so you can't live here”, or “Your children are not important, they're not considered Indians because their father and grandfathers were non-native.”
To me, we need a lot of work in the community and to discuss among ourselves, but we're busy surviving. We're busy making do with the money that is allocated to each community, done in piecemeal kinds of ways.
I think what we need is in the education system itself, in primary school and in high school, it should be the requirement of anybody who wants to run as chief to know what is the impact of violence. How has colonization impacted us in regard to the level of violence that we see in the communities?
Let's look at the Catholic church. The Pope says don't use condoms. Well, you know what that means to a man who has contracted HIV/AIDS, and he says to his wife or his girlfriend that if she really loved him, she wouldn't make him wear a condom. So we find that aboriginal women, even though we're a small percentage of the population, also have the fastest growing rate of contracting AIDS. Another part of the coin that we fail to include in the discussions with government is how the church or religion is used against us.
Education is I think one of the key factors in educating police, lawyers, social workers, especially Québécois social workers, and I'm just going to talk about Quebec here. One of the things we find with social workers is that they will take away the children of a woman who lives in poverty simply because she's poor. We've asked the Quebec government not to include poverty in their definition of negligence. We have to look at what is the situation in the community—high unemployment, poverty. We can't address this issue of violence without looking at some of the factors that contribute to it, and legislation and how it contributes to the devaluing of women by saying, “Well, you and your children are not good enough to live on the reserve.” INAC creates the membership code, the criteria, and there are four different kinds of membership codes the band can have. It doesn't follow our customs, it doesn't follow our traditions, but it can legally discriminate against an aboriginal woman in moving back into her community. She can have status in Ottawa, but she can't have her membership and access to services in the community.
So what the Indian Act has done is it has broken the family unit. It has broken that and it has severed us from those kinds of wonderful cultural values that make everyone equal, that make everyone know they are precious and that they are part of the world we live in.
I know I can wax philosophical on this, but education at every single level, on what violence is, whether it's sexual violence, institutionalized violence, racism.... The women who are heading to urban areas are doing that out of survival. If they work on the street, they're doing it out of survival, and especially if you're an anglophone in Quebec. If you don't speak French, you're not going to get a job. I'm sorry, you're not going to get a job. So this is another challenge for us in Quebec, if we do not speak French.
We have to learn French and English. What about our indigenous language?
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Yes. It's actually a requirement.
I know it has been said many times, but I just want to repeat it again: violence against aboriginal women, or women in general, is a man's problem. Men need to get on board with this. It's not just a women's issue. Men of every race, at every level of society, have to become involved. Men have to start denouncing it. The government has to denounce it publicly. Quebec Native Women was part of a group of organizations from Justice Québec.
Justice Québec created a working group, the women and justice tripartite committee, which issued a report in 2003 with recommendations that talked about educating lawyers, judges, and police officers. They didn't go so far as to recommend educating government, but I think government really needs to become involved.
There should be some kind of training before a person enters a ministry of any kind, to talk about all these different issues that are considered social issues, such as violence, to educate them on what we as indigenous people have experienced in the last 500 or so years. Where does it start? It starts when children are young. If we're going to stop this cycle of violence, whether it's within aboriginal communities or in the rest of Canadian society, it starts with mothers and fathers, if that's possible, teaching their children at home.
Discussion about violence should be an integral part of the school system. Violence is wrong. We teach children about good touch, bad touch. We should also be teaching them about another kind of good touch, bad touch, which is violence. It's violence against their mothers. It's violence from the residential schools.
I'm going to quote something from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, article 14:
Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.
That's why we hope the Canadian government will fully endorse this declaration without any qualifications, because this is really a guide on how to decolonize. This is a decolonization process.
In terms of staying in school, the Auditor General of Canada, in her 2008 or 2009 report, said it would take 28 years for on-reserve schools to catch up with the quality of education in the rest of Canadian schools. So there in itself we have a huge gap in regard to the quality of education for aboriginal children.
Music and art are the first things to go in any educational system, but music and art are part of the basis of our culture. It's an expression of all our relations. Our languages, as I said before, are all our indigenous knowledge. It's our way of knowing. It's our way of being. So we have to have education systems that do not make traditional languages, indigenous languages, secondary, but that actually support curricula that are developed, that actually support the teachers, whether they're native or non-native, who come to teach in our schools so they can motivate children to love education, to love to learn. If you have excellent teachers, you can be sure that the child is going to want to learn more.
I'll just end with a quote that an elder told me. He had this Hopi friend whose son became a lawyer, and after he graduated he said, “Dad, I'm going to come back and help our people.” The father said to him, “Son, you've learned western culture. Now you're going to come back and learn our ways, and then you're going to be able to help our people.”
Thank you.
:
I was going to throw it in there. One of the challenges we face with regard to matrimonial real property is that there is a housing shortage in the community, so it's difficult to start a business. The other thing is that a judge will have to look at matrimonial real property and know the Indian Act. How many civil court judges know the Indian Act? If they don't know it, how is the community supposed to filter through this?
The other issue is that in remote communities, those women do not have access to legal aid, as we do closer to cities like Montreal or Quebec City. So there's a vacuum with regard to their access to justice. The bill does not address that particular section and that reality of aboriginal women.
There was a lack of adequate consultation. We had a month and a half to consult. I think most Canadians, if there are going to be legislative changes in Canada, are granted a year. There was a 500-page report from Wendy Grant-John, who was the minister's appointed representative. There were hardly any, if any, recommendations from that report: 500 pages and nothing in it talks about what the communities were saying.
I think the problem we have among ourselves is a lot of our communities don't even know what MRP is. They don't know the details involved in MRP. From what I've heard, they're asking for the rejection of this MRP bill, which we don't want to happen. We want the MRP bill to pass with amendments, just as we want Bill to pass with amendments, but the government is not listening. They're not accommodating our concerns.
Consultation...it's not just about our opinions. It's about accommodating our concerns. It's about a dialogue. It's about a partnership. That has not happened in any of the engagement sessions I have been involved in, nor the brief consultations there were on MRP.
For fee simple, yes, we have certificates of possession. Yes, we have these tiny pieces of land that are reserved for our benefit and use. I think what has not been discussed for our communities is that we want to be able to have the same kinds of economic opportunities that other people have. If we're to put up our land as collateral and we lose that land, it's taking what little we do have from our communities.
I know Mr. Jules is travelling right across Canada. For me, it's just another form of the white paper policy that was rejected in the 1970s. It's not adequate. You can't take what happens in the rest of Canada and put it in our communities. It doesn't work.
We want to have protection for our land, for future generations and for the present generation. Fee simple is not the best idea, I think, to help economic development. We need access to our land, to our resources. We need to sit down and dialogue with government. We should not have this “talk down” or “talking at”.
The government deals with the issues of aboriginal people in a very archaic, paternalistic way. It's 2010, for goodness' sake. We know all about your culture, but it's as if our culture is irrelevant: “It's going to be put in a museum, so you should be happy. That's how we're going to protect your culture.” It just doesn't work.
Thank you.
:
There absolutely has to be participation by provincial authorities. As I've often mentioned, discrimination in the case of many cultural and socio-economic issues depends on the provinces.
We clearly need the cooperation of the various departments. Moreover, rapporteurs often handle aboriginal issues within the Government of Quebec. There has to be representation of the departments, aboriginal representation and the representation of aboriginal women as well; that's clear, especially at the federal level.
They'll have to agree on the urgent short-term and long-term needs, which will require other approaches and other consultations. However, the short-term, among other things, is everything that concerns the police and the safe houses. That depends on the provincial level. The police report to the municipal, provincial and sometimes federal levels with regard to security.
Together with the aboriginal groups, we must define the short-term action plans and then address the long-term, economic self-sufficiency, employment access, land consultation. These are much more complex, much more difficult subjects. One day or another, we'll have to establish a round table, a consultation table.
In addition, some things are incredible. Canada's image is tarnished because the country is being told what's happening in the country through UN bodies, through Amnesty International and through aboriginal groups. There has to be a federal government initiative through the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. In particular, our has to show some political will. They have to say they want to do it, that they are inviting you to consultations and say that they are going to invite people to sit around the table. First there has to be a reading of the issues.
I don't believe we necessarily always have the same reading of the issues. Amnesty International and I are afraid of one thing. In the action plan that contained that $10 million amount that was put on the table, the reading was reduced to the criminal analysis of matters. We're going to solve the problem of women who have disappeared and the problems association with assassinated women. This is very far from being a uniquely criminal issue. Together we have to agree on the scope of the problem. It will take work just to do that.
:
I simply want to add something on the issue of the federal and provincial governments.
When we live in a province, in Quebec, for example, and you come from an aboriginal community, you often wind up stuck in this opposition between the federal and provincial governments. It's every day; it's constant.
With regard to consultations, who's in the best position? We, the aboriginal peoples, know our history, our situation and what our needs are. It's important to take the time to consult. Often there's very little consultation of the aboriginal populations about their situation. I believe they know it very well.
At the time, we had a health system, a political system and a way of doing things. Today they think we are unable to take care of our people. And yet, as regards existing aboriginal resources, as I told you a little earlier, there are only 12 safe houses, but there are 58 communities, if you count the Inuit communities.
The comparison is always made with the non-aboriginal population. There are approximately 90 safe houses for the Quebec people, whereas there are only 12 aboriginal safe houses. When you know that there is three times as much violence in our communities, that's not right.
In the case of these aboriginal resources, the caseworkers are aboriginal, and they speak the language. They say that, to be a caseworker, you have to speak the language, but it takes more than that. It's the approach you use.
In the non-aboriginal safe houses, they talk a lot about feminist approaches, and women are encouraged to find a certain self-sufficiency when they are victims of violence. They are encouraged to take care of themselves. They often talk about being self-sufficient and taking care of themselves. However, we don't talk like that to aboriginal women. These women don't want to leave their husbands. They want to unite the family. In their minds, when you're married, you're married for life.
That's why the resources, including the safe houses that assist women, aren't the choice. You also have to help the man and the family. That's why we have to provide truly appropriate assistance. We must no longer see this break between the federal and the provincial levels.
With regard to funding, the safe houses are a good example. Since 2000, Quebec Native Women Inc., or QNW, has exercised a lot of pressure for increased funding for safe houses. I'd like to provide an update of that information.
We've been exercising pressure since 2000. Yes, funding has increased, but, at the same time, at the time when we were making demands, the gap between the provincial funding received by the aboriginal safe houses and that received by Quebec safe houses was $100,000. The more the gap increased, the more we demanded that it be corrected. At one point, the gap was $300,000.
The federal government announced an increase in funding for safe houses and basic funding was increased in 2008. So we've come back to the original gap of $100,000. That's currently the gap that exists between safe houses governed by the provincial government and those regulated by the federal level. That's a flagrant example.
And yet, those houses assist people in crisis, who are trying to commit suicide, substance abusers and the families of disappeared women. It isn't just a matter of awareness and assistance for women victims of violence.
:
Thank you very much, Ms. Shauk.
We have eight minutes left. There were a couple of things I wanted to ask. The chair rarely gets that pleasure.
We've heard so much information today that I think it's really important for the committee to understand the difference between the needs of women on reserve and the needs of women off reserve, the urban women coming from Vancouver, which is where I am.
Aboriginal women seem to be no one's child. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for them. The federal government says they're off reserve, don't look at us. The provincial government says it's a federal jurisdiction for all aboriginal people. Generally speaking, the municipalities are the ones who have to deal with the reality of their lives. As Stella well knows, from having gone to Vancouver, a lot of these women end up on the streets. They end up being sex trade workers because they have no choice. They become addicted. They're exploited enormously. When all of these women were killed, as we saw in the Pickton incident, these were women who did go into the shadows, into the dark places, so that they could get a $5 trick to buy their next fix because they had nothing, or to get $5 so that they could feed their kids. This is the plight of women who are off reserve and in the cities. The solution I've heard you saying—you sort of hinted at it—has to be very different than for the women on reserve.
I'd like to hear just a quick synopsis about what you think one should do to deal with the fact that no one wants to take responsibility for aboriginal women off reserve.
On reserve, when we went to Nunavut and other places—and I find this distressing because you mentioned it, Ms. Gabriel—we heard that aboriginal women seem to think that violence is just their lot, that this is what their lives are going to be like. There is the sense of absolute hopelessness because of the intergenerational residential school thing. They grew up not seeing parenting, but knowing that they were bad, to speak their language was awful, their culture was terrible, they were little savages, and they had to change, and to be who they were.... Many of them were treated with sexual, psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical violence. For them, violence is something that has been handed down intergenerationally. Women don't want to leave the reserve; they don't want to leave home. Many of them believe that their husbands or their partners are not necessarily finding ways to deal with that same problem that all aboriginal people have.
On the concept of a shelter, a crisis centre, I'd like to hear.... If you had a crisis centre, how would that work if the women did not want to leave home? We also heard that when the police came in, the police wanted to lay a criminal charge and the women didn't want them to lay a criminal charge. So they didn't report it because they didn't want their husband or their partner to be taken away from the family, and they were disrupting the whole reserve by this. So they shut up and waited until it got so very bad.
If you had crisis centres there on reserve and they needed to move from a crisis centre to a shelter, to a transitional house, and then to second-stage housing, which are three different entities, how would you see that working? Would they have to leave the reserve? How would they move from the family? There's a conundrum there. How do we resolve that conundrum?
If you could answer those two questions, one about the plight of the urban aboriginal woman and the other one.... Everywhere we've gone we've heard about the need for a national, comprehensive, integrated, interjurisdictional, long-term strategy working with communities to ensure that they can do that, and that's the only thing that will work. You just repeated everything we're hearing everywhere we go.
Can I have an answer to those quickly? And then I want to thank you for having come.
Ms. Gabriel, I'm looking at you.
:
First of all, I would like to thank you for this invitation. I'm going to start with a brief presentation and tell you about my expertise, in particular.
I've been interested in aboriginal issues and criminal justice since 1985. I am a full professor at the School of Criminology of the University of Montreal. I've explored a number of aspects of aboriginal issues, in particular through work that I've been able to do on the marginalization of aboriginal women in urban areas, more particularly in Montreal. Through a life history, I've traced marginalization pathways.
I've done some work on aboriginal police. I've looked into aboriginal perspectives on social regulation and criminal justice. I have been interested and still am very interested today in potential approaches other than traditional justice. I've done some work on healing circles and sentencing circles. Restorative justice is one of my fields of expertise. I've also started work on the incarceration of aboriginal women. I recently completed a recent project on the experience of aboriginal women who are victims of violence in relation to the resources they have been able to use. Lastly, I am currently a member of a research team, with my colleague Marie-Pierre Bousquet, on the experience of aboriginal women in relation to violence here in Quebec, specifically for the purpose of determining action that may be taken based on the women's experiences. That, in summary, is my background.
I would like to mention that, although some of the projects I just cited did not focus directly on violence against women, it goes without saying that that issues runs through all the projects I have done to date.
My presentation is based on three issues in particular. I should say “our presentation” since, as my colleague said, we agreed to combine our presentations. The first issue is as follows: what is the situation regarding violence against aboriginal women in Quebec? The second issue is: how should we analyze the situation? Let's put the question another way: why are things not improving? The third question is as follows: what action measures would be promising?
My colleague will mainly focus on the second question. In my remarks, I will try to answer the first question. Then I will encroach on the third question. Marie-Pierre Bousquet will also address the third question.
What is the situation regarding violence against aboriginal women in Quebec? I would say at the outset that there is no statistical or qualitative overall picture of the violence experienced by aboriginal women in Quebec. There are studies, but they are scattered and not very recent. Those few studies suggest that violence is not a recent phenomenon. We mainly began to talk about it in the 1980s. Moreover, it is not because we started talking about it in the 1980s that it wasn't going on before that. It does not appear to be a declining phenomenon, quite on the contrary, it seems to be growing, which is of course very disturbing. It is very widespread in the communities, but also in the urban centres.
I draw your attention to the fact that the major challenge in future will also be to deal with what is going on in urban areas, since there has been a major shifts by aboriginal to urban areas since the 1980s. The violence is serious and comes in many forms, that is to say it is physical, psychological and sexual. It is more widespread, but also more serious than among non-aboriginals. It starts earlier, in childhood. It is expressed over a very long period of life. It usually starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. It is a daily occurrence, trivialized and part of a family relationship dynamic, and thus arises between spouses, and it is transgenerational. There are other things to say about it, but let's say that's a summary.
As I mentioned, I conducted a study on the experience of aboriginal women who are victims of violence. We surveyed a number of accounts of experiences of 36 women from various nations in Quebec. Based on that research into the experience of those women and into the various resources that we could use, I was able to make other findings. I'll mention them briefly. I'll obviously have the opportunity to answer your questions more specifically, particularly on the strategies implemented by the women who are confronted with a dynamic of violence, and also on the impact of the resources used.
This is a qualitative study. It revealed, among other things, that one of the problems is that, from the initial outbreaks of violence, aboriginal women tend to adapt to the situation and to really do nothing. That's often an initial reaction, and it's an attitude that is a factor in maintaining the cycle of violence. We also found that all women in our sample used a considerable number of formal and informal resources, some 15 on average, in their life path, during their experience. The average age of our sample of women was 44 years. The main results of these studies who that an aboriginal woman's ability to break out of the cycle of violence, or to remain in it, is related to three interrelated aspects. Those aspects are as follows: socio-demographic profile, victimization profile and use of resources in the event of violence. So these are the types of resources and the chronology of the use of those resources.
Let's briefly mention some other elements of the socio-demographic profile. I would perhaps simply like to mention that the research, based on those 36 paths, enabled us to determine two groups: one group that is doing relatively well, which has managed to break out of this cycle of violence, and the second group, at the time of the interviews, that has remained prisoners of that violence. So our research attempted to understand what differentiated those two groups.
The socio-demographic profile is precisely what differentiates them. Educated women, women who are in the work force do much better. Aboriginal women seem much more resilient than Inuit women. The emotional isolation of women is very important, as we'll see, in taking action, the destructuring of the family cell, and in particular, the loss of parental custody, which may or may not result in the violence experienced, contribute to a context which is not particularly conducive to a break with the dynamics of violence.
As regards the victimization profile, we finally realized that it was less the objective seriousness of the violence than the duration and type of violence that differentiated the women who did better from those who remained within the dynamic of violence.
It emerges that sexual violence and violence that occurs early in childhood are two factors of persistence in the violent situation. What is more, I would say that those two situations, sexual violence and early violence, tend to favour the adoption of violent behaviours in women victims as well. This enables me to mention that violence must absolutely be analyzed in the context of a dynamic. I'm going to place considerable emphasis on the idea that this issue must really be integrated into the dynamic. In addition, we must break the polarized analysis, the classic analysis when it comes to violence against women of the executioner and victim type. Furthermore, the studies very clearly show that men who are violent were also victims of violence during their childhoods.
With regard to the third aspect, the resources used, we realized that the resilient group and the group that persists in violence do not differ greatly with respect to the type of resources used.
All the women in our sample made use of the family, the police, treatment centres, traditional practices, safe houses, and so on. I obviously have more things to say; we'll see based on your questions.
We realized that the most important thing is not so much the type of resource that is used as the manner in which that resource is used. More particularly, one has to look at what goals the women pursue when they use a specialized resource providing help this regard to violence. For example, aboriginal women who use resources for respite or protection are usually the ones who remain in that dynamic of violence because they use it somewhat provisionally, as respite, whereas women who use the same resources with a view to personally taking or taking back control of their lives are the ones who do much better.
I have a lot of things to say, but I'll close with the promising action measures. I'll offer them all together. For me, it's very important that the action measures be implemented on a number of fronts at the same time. I think it's extremely important not to target just one measure, but to consider a whole range of them.
First I would say that we must change our way of understanding the phenomenon of violence against women. I'll give you some details if you have any questions on that. We also must not duplicate non-aboriginal actions and programs in an aboriginal setting; we must not cut and paste. Initiatives that come from aboriginals themselves must be reinforced. It must be understood, and I really emphasize this, that repressive approaches are not constructive. A distinction has to be drawn; we must not confuse safety or exclusion, for example of the aggressor with repression.
The purposes of the justice system must be transformed by innovating through the adoption of various responses. I'm thinking of the courts specialized in domestic violence, for example. We must develop interventions that are inclusive, that is to say that include all the protagonists: spouse, family and community, in particular, through cultural practices. I'm thinking of what I know a little better, the healing circles, restorative justice and justice committees.
I think we also have to act upstream from the problem, not just on the problem, by, for example, supporting and reinforcing the leadership of aboriginal women in the communities, supporting access to key positions, to local authorities such as the mayor's office, etc. We have to fight poverty, develop a harm reduction approach to drugs and alcohol. We have to support aboriginal women's associations, and so on.
I think training should be given on violence to all psychosocial stakeholders who intervene in the community, which includes health staff, police officers, socio-judicial staff, but also teaching staff, for example. Similar training has to be planned in urban areas as well.
In my opinion, we must not standardize the programs and actions that might be adopted; we have to be aware of the specific nature of the communities in order to support those actions. I think we should develop policies in urban areas to combat discrimination, stereotypes, to reinforce the deployment of a support network for aboriginal women in urban areas; that's the great challenge for the future.
I would close by mentioning one very important element. At the political level, we must start soon to eliminate all the discriminatory sections in the Indian Act.
Thank you.
I'd also like to start by thanking you for inviting me to come and testify here. I'll introduce myself as well.
I am Marie-Pierre Bousquet. I am Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Montreal. I've been working on aboriginal issues since the mid-1990s, and I am more particularly interested in Amerindian societies, and thus a little less in Inuit societies.
I lived in an Anishnabe community in Quebec for a year in 1996. I have continued making frequent stays there since then for my research and other reasons. Since my research discipline, my work is mainly focused on field research, and that's extremely important for me.
I have examined various issues throughout my years in research, but I have focused particularly on intergenerational relations, relations with the land, on the landscape of religious beliefs, on disintoxication, on the passage into adulthood, and I'm also taking part in a research project on the experience of aboriginal women with violence, in a research group to which Mylène Jaccoud belongs.
I have cited all these research themes. They don't necessarily seem related to violence to you. In fact, they are. If I just take the example of relations with the land, the fact, for example, of sometimes staying on the land or getting closer to the land may be a way for women to become more aware of the violence they experience, of finding a certain peace and making decisions. That's just to give you an idea. All the themes I've addressed here are related to social problems. So I'm going to elaborate in particular on the second point stated by Ms. Jaccoud, that is why violence is perpetuated in aboriginal environments.
As you no doubt know, aboriginal women have the sad record of being the most vulnerable population in all of Canada. On a daily basis, they are the women who are most often victims of family violence and spousal abuse by their spouses who, I recall, can be either aboriginal or alloriginal. It's not necessarily a question of the spouse's origin.
There is every reason to believe that violence has always existed, in all societies, but that it is only increasing among aboriginal peoples. This growth is related to a number of factors: the stress of colonization, the pressure of acculturation and the imposition of Canadian ways of doing things. It has also only increased with the collapse of the traditional economy of the aboriginal peoples and with the unemployment related to that collapse, with the shifts to a sedentary lifestyle, with the increased guardianship of subsequent government authorities and with the social responses such as alcohol abuse and drug abuse, which existed before the switch to sedentary lifestyles but which have undergone phenomenal development since that shift.
We can therefore say that the accumulated injuries have created a vicious circle of violence, which partly explains this perpetuation of violence. We can distinguish two general ways of managing violence in the aboriginal communities. The first are the traditional methods of conflict management. The second is resorting to institutions that were originally imposed by the colonial regime, that is to say the police and the law courts.
I have done a lot of work on the issue of traditional methods of conflict management. Those traditional methods have been quite undermined by the intervention, indeed interventionism, of the Canadian government and its law enforcement representatives. By interventionism, I mean here the interference in the affairs of aboriginal peoples with the use, in particular, of a legal system that absolutely did not appeal to the aboriginal peoples and that was not based on their ways of viewing the offence and other aspects.
There nevertheless are still aboriginal ways to assist women suffering from violence, ways that I would call informal resources. One of the most important informal resources, in the research I have conducted for aboriginal women and Amerindian women in particular is the family network. By that I mean the network of over-kinship, that is to say both kinship and affinity. This is a mutual assistance network consisting of people who general kindred relationships, but who are not necessarily very close relations.
Aboriginal women who are victims of violence can also turn to formal resources such as social services programs and safe houses. However, they don't necessarily always know those resources. And they don't necessarily feel very comfortable there either. Why doesn't this situation improve? There are many reasons. My colleague has already mentioned a few. I'm not going to try to classify them, but I think the most important is without a doubt the general apathy toward this problem.
The fate of aboriginal women seems to be—I'm going to say it in English with a very bad accent and I apologize to the anglophones—the dirty little secret of Canada. Tens of Amerindian, Inuit and Metis women disappear and are assassinated without that mobilizing the media or the authorities. So there should obviously be—that's no doubt why you are here—a federal political will, a provincial and local will to change things.
The preferred models that we tend to think of are the police, the law courts and the other agents in charge of maintaining the regulations of society. Those models, preferred by those whom I call “the agents of social regulation” are repression, on the one hand, and treatment or prevention on the other.
As my colleague said, we clearly realized, based on all the research we did, that repression doesn't work at all. Moreover, the programs are very scattered, which makes them highly unproductive and they are also poorly matched with the informal resources that are not really taken into account, which considerably undermines their effectiveness.
In addition, aboriginals still have very little control over the implementation of programs. The communities are not independent with regard to development, and their general state of economic and administrative dependence contributes largely to the problem. The housing and job shortages and low education levels are part of the equation of reproduction and violence. Moreover, as my colleague emphasized, the more a woman has access to a good education and is integrated into the work force, the more chances she will have of breaking out of the circle of violence.
With regard to education, we cannot forget a fact that contributes to the lack of governance, that aboriginals lack training to apply treatment and prevention programs. Furthermore, if they wish to build programs that are more consistent with their way of doing things, they must at times seek private funding and do not always know where to get it.
Even though women are increasingly accessing positions as chiefs and spokespersons for their nations, the fact nevertheless remains that power remains largely in the hands of men, whether it be at the head of band councils or at the head of Quebec municipalities where aboriginals live. The political discrimination of women for Quebec societies was introduced through relations with Euro-Canadians and amplified through the legal violence?? suffered by Amerindian women since the 19th century. I won't go into the history of the Indian Act, which you must surely know, or the debates to which that act still give rise, but I would like to emphasize that the maintenance of legal discrimination against women, which violates their rights and freedom to identify themselves and their descendants as Amerindians, is part of that violence and at times helps give people living in the communities arguments for excluding women and maintaining violence against them.
That also contributes to a segregation of their problems, as a result of which aboriginal women clearly understood, when they decided to create their associations in the early 1970s, that they had to attack on their own, without separating the two subjects, both the injustices of the Indian Act and the problems of violence. I'm thinking of the aboriginal woman from Quebec, for example, who belongs to the Quebec Native Women's Association. From the time the Association was established, the two themes have always been completely linked. Moreover, it is time that everyone share their awareness of that fact.
Although the aboriginal women's associations have made it possible to achieve progress in taking the abuses this population suffers into account, the community levers are still inadequate.
A good example is the promotion of models of conduct in which the leadership of women is not rightly valued. In the aboriginal communities, women are generally viewed in a paradoxical manner as keepers of the culture and as being responsible for transmitting that culture. So one could say at the outset that this is a highly valued hot, very prestigious role, but at the same time it's difficult for them to enter important positions and to make their voices heard. So they also work very hard to show that being a woman and aboriginal can be associated with pursing an education, getting involved politically and socially and the embodiment of values such as sobriety, care for others and so on. So it would undoubtedly be necessary to encourage and develop these models of conduct and access for women to leadership.
Lastly, it should be borne in mind, even though it's obvious, that aboriginal cultures must be taken into account. The perpetuation of violence also depends on factors that are observed in aboriginal environments, such as the rule of silence, which is a big problem—if only in detecting violence before confronting it—fear of informing and the fact that people can find violence and acceptable. I lived in an Anishinabe community for a year, and I can tell you that, by the end of one year, I wound up finding violence normal—in talking like that when people tell each other village gossip—and that scared me. So this is part of that environment.
Aboriginal women generally live in a close relationship with those who make them suffer, and they are often afraid that, if they speak out, they will break up their social environment and the support they have. These factors, which maintain a status quo, must be considered in environments that very much operate in isolation. Together with that is the fact that the current response to violence against aboriginal women are inappropriate and inadequate.
It also should not be forgotten that the history of relations between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the police in the aboriginal communities is a charged history that is past on in aboriginal circles, of particularly harsh action taken against aboriginal people, interventions that were considered unjustified, imprisonment for minor offences, and the removal of children from their parents. Moreover, the history of relations with the law courts isn't any better. That history weighs on the quality and effectiveness of services provided by police and the justice system in aboriginal communities. In addition to that is the fact that many services won't be adapted to aboriginal cultures, quite simply as a result of a total and absolute lack of knowledge of aboriginal cultures—that strikes me every time.
There are of course aboriginal police officers, aboriginal social workers, substance abuse and crime caseworkers who are aboriginal, and other qualified staff. Their advantages that they know the actual situation on the ground, but there aren't always enough of them, far from it. In addition, they very often have close ties with the assailants or their victims and are not always well trained, particularly in detecting violence that isn't necessarily physically predictable. So they often tend to apply the term violence to what corresponds to very visible marks of blows—we've seen that in particular in the research we're conducting right now. However, the violence isn't limited strictly to that form; it can be non-verbal but can be verbal as well. We also noted that, for non-physical violence in particular, non-aboriginal staff are not necessarily better trained than aboriginal staff.
My colleague has already noted some courses of action, and I'm going to focus particularly on two of them. It's important to start by emphasizing that it is hard to talk about women without talking about men. First, that doesn't reflect the views of women or what they want in the matter, and if women are also suffering from violence, is because the men are suffering too. The spouses, family members and children are all part of this circle of violence. They are all affected by the resulting trauma, either because they are responsible for it, because they are its targets or simply because they have experience and reproduce it. Everyone needs support, and the care and attention in the social environment must be comprehensive.
The development of traditional approaches should also be encouraged. By traditional approaches, I also mean simply aboriginal approaches, that is to say innovative models, that the aboriginals would like to experiment with if they consider them more appropriate to their way of being.
Allow me to finish by emphasizing one fact. As a result of my specialization, I am particularly interested in culture, but the cultural difference of aboriginal women must absolutely be taken into account in helping the manage these problems.
That cultural difference exists and is lasting. It is there despite 500 years of living together. We must, in particular, involve and sensitize not only aboriginals, but also Allochtones in this matter, to help address and destroy prejudices that have lasted as a result of ignorance and that perpetuate the systemic violence against aboriginals.
Thank you.
:
Thank you for your very relevant and interesting question.
It's true that this is very complicated. When I emphasize that there is no ideal solution, that's really what I have observed. Let's consider the example of safe houses. I'm not saying that safe houses are useless, but this is a type of measure that doesn't really address the causes of violence. In our research, we've realized that once again it's the woman who bears the burden of having to leave the home. The aggressor often stays in the community. Once again, the burden is on the woman to take action, to leave, and all that. If the safe house is located outside the community, sometimes there's this burden.
However, it's difficult to respond unilaterally. In all my research, I've met women who said that it was important for them to leave; others said they would prefer to stay. Still others said they felt more comfortable on the outside, that a safe house, with non-aboriginals, because their anonymity was good for them, whereas others said they needed cultural proximity to their own people, that they felt better in their communities. That's why I very much emphasize that you have to be creative, but you especially have to be close to the people.
I know that you work in politics. I know you start from above and put in place structures and initiatives at the bottom level. Instead, I think you have to develop inductive approaches and sometimes go from one community to another to get a clear idea of the local realities and to deploy a number of services so as to respond to the diversity of people's needs. If a woman needs to stay in her community, there should be a structure that permits that. If a woman wants to leave her community, there should be a structure that permits that, and not say that we're going to establish safe houses in all communities.
What is more, sometimes there's a problem with the operation of those safe houses, which resemble prisons. It's incredible that an aboriginal woman who is a victim of violence... I won't name the place because there would be no point. It's nevertheless incredible to see aboriginal women feeling doubly victimized because they have schedules they have to follow: they can't leave when they want to. In a way they feel shut in. That's absolutely unacceptable.
The major difficulty, in my view, is understanding that, as a result of the proximity and cultural differences Marie-Pierre referred to, we have to innovate and find completely different things. That requires a lot of creativity in the communities. I find there's often a lack of imagination.
I don't know whether I'm doing a good job of answering your question. I don't think we need to focus our efforts solely on the idea of safe houses. The safe house is one solution, but it's very temporary.
I don't know whether I answered your question.
:
I'd like to make what will be a somewhat paradoxical comment. I believe that the weight of colonization absolutely should not be denied. It must not be forgotten. We are all responsible. There's really something that has to be denounced. I think it has to be officially recognized that Canada was a colonial state. It still is. We still have a long way to go.
Here's the paradoxical part of my comment. Every time we establish initiatives and say that colonization is responsible, from a pragmatic point of view, that doesn't produce a lot of courses of action. I think this historical fact has to be acknowledged, but that, once it's said, we have to move on to action. We have to stop making the causes of colonization the driver of action.
As for recommendations, I think we really have to start supporting aboriginal people in order to develop governance. That's a fashionable word, I know, and we don't always like it. I'm going to give you an example. I'm conducting a study on the Inuit community of Kuujjuaq for the Department of Justice. Knowing the problem involved in imposing methods of regulation that absolutely do not suit those communities, I'm still going to place considerable emphasis on the fact that the punitive and repressive approach, which includes the police and justice systems, does not work. On the day we've understood that a social problem cannot be resolved by means of a justice system, we'll have taken a major step. However, we aren't stuck with that. We're still attaching importance, above all, to the fact that this is an offence. When a man beats a woman, its an offence, of course, but the legal answer isn't the right answer. They have the courage to go beyond that and to do something else.
I'm suggesting an approach for the community of Kuujjuaq. In my mind, the central course of action is to rebuild social regulation in the communities. How do we do that? By grouping together all existing resources and supporting all existing forms of regulation; by creating joint action; by having an orchestra conductor who makes the actions consistent and who is like a link in a chain; by no longer excluding people because they have committed an offence; by adopting inclusive approaches; by reinforcing all the initiatives so that people can take charge of their lives. So, yes, that's governance.
We have to rebuild this social regulation. I believe in this. In particular, we can do it through initiatives like circles, committees and local organizations. We have to reinforce leadership, target the few families in which things are going well and which can become very high-profile models. Lastly, it has to be understood that aboriginal people have abilities. It's simply that the aboriginal communities have lost confidence in them. The fact remains that those abilities exist. We have to go and find them.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I don't know where to begin. I clearly heard what you said, and I believe you're right all down the line. Ultimately, I wonder whether we're not the ones who need cultural education, because I realized that, all too often, the decisions are made for someone's good; they aren't made based on that person's needs. We always believe we know better, can do better, than the people directly involved in the community.
I heard Mr. Desnoyers talking about colonization and I drew the parallel with apartheid in South Africa, a country where there is a lot of violence against women as well, where that has increasingly developed and where women have adjusted to violence. It's true, women adjust to violence, because it's easier to adjust and to continue to suffer it than to do something to counter it.
There's one term that I've always detested, and that's the term “reserve”. I'm tired of hearing that word. Reserves are in Africa for animals, not for human beings. Shouldn't we be teaching young people in our schools, in our entire society so they know about history, so they know with whom they share the land, that that land initially wasn't theirs? Shouldn't we do something to ensure that the real history is known and to re-establish the facts?
For a very long time, I thought we were engaged in charity with aboriginal people, with the First Nations—because that's what we were taught—until I met Ellen Gabriel and she told me the history and I understood that we weren't being charitable with anyone. These are things that we owe them, and we're still not giving them enough again, in return for what we've taken from them.
It very much concerns me to see that there is a very large gap between what we say and what we do. You also mentioned harmony between the various levels of government. Let's simply take the example of the new provincial policy on children. If there are problems, the Youth Court can remove the child from the aboriginal mother, in an aboriginal community and take the child kilometers away from there where she won't have an opportunity to see the child as frequently. These are things that make no sense. We're reproducing the history of the residential schools. I wonder who will establish the link between the various levels of government so this has some kind of consistency.
That may be a complicated thought and question because there are so many ideas in my head.
:
I'd simply like to add that I entirely agree with my colleague. In response to Mr. Desnoyers, regarding possible solutions—I also agree with Ms. Demers—I would say that there are two important aspects, in my view: education and governance.
The aboriginal communities, whether it be on reserve, in institutions, in villages or in northern and other municipalities, don't have enough governance, that is to say that they have quite little flexibility within the system. They receive programs and budgets that they have to implement, but that leave very little room for initiative. That's obviously very harmful because we can't withdraw everything from someone and hope for that person to remain independent. That makes no sense.
In fact, since I offer two full courses of three hours a week on colonization every semester, I often wonder—and every time, I'm dumb-founded—how much worse it could have been. Aboriginal people are much more resilient than we think. I say to myself that they lost their economy, their social system, we prohibited them their belief system, they were prohibited from even wearing their traditional costumes. They were prohibited a lot of things. Things should be worse, but they managed not to come out of it as badly as that. They have a lot of will. The communities in which I work are extremely dynamic. There are a lot of young people who want to pull through. So they have to be given more governance. It's more than a fashionable word, as my colleague said.
There's also education. I'm a university professor. My students appear before me in the first class, and I ask them what the 11 aboriginal nations of Quebec are. They live in Quebec, and most of them are Quebeckers. They know a few names here and there. They don't know where the communities are. They don't know how many there are. They don't even know that there are 11. They know nothing, and I mean “nothing”. They have vaguely heard about those communities. They have images of either fantastic people in harmony with nature or of very violent drunkards. There's nothing between the two.
I've been working with aboriginal people for more than 15 years. If it was that horrible, I would have changed occupations a long time ago. So education is fundamentally important. We often talk about the education of aboriginal people and say they have to be better trained and so on, but young Allochtones also have to be trained so they know a minimum. For example, I do a lot of work in regions. Most of the people don't know that the villages where they live have Indian names. That should be posted at the entrance to the village. We should have access to the toponyms so they are more visible. We live in a province where aboriginal people are quite invisible.
I've been to other provinces. Proportionally, of course, there are more aboriginal people. In Vancouver, for example, there is a certain aboriginal presence, if only in art, which is omnipresent, which is everywhere. In Quebec, where do we see the aboriginal presence? You walk around in Montreal and you could very well not know that the lookout on top of Mount Royal is called “Kondiaronk”, after the name of a great Indian chief. Where is that presence? What marks that presence? There's nothing.
So we have to take part in the visibility of aboriginal people, a positive visibility, and show that these are people who are part of society and that there are all kinds of people and occupations among them: workers, secretaries, designers, doctors, lawyers and so on. We have to start by showing that they also live in that society, that they are part of it and that they have a history that's worth the trouble of getting to know, an absolutely marvellous history. I would like that learning to start in primary school in fact. I would be pleased about that.
:
I'd like to add a few comments. This act dates back to 1876 and was originally based on racial criteria. When it was introduced, a man, that man's children and, lastly, that man's lawful wife were Indians. That necessarily marked people because the act is characterized by patriarchal conceptions. In addition, it does not apply to all Indians. It only applies to those who are entered in the federal register, and that register, as its name indicates, is federal, that is to say that it is Ottawa that decides who is Indian and who is not. So that's the first problem. Belonging, recognition as an Indian depends, on a priority basis, on the services that the person receives from the federal government. The act also imposed a political system, the band council system, which was established in order to standardize politics, but also to establish the criteria for defining who would be the government's interlocutors.
Without going too far into the details, I will say that it is very hard to be a band chief. In fact, a band chief is simultaneously a kind of head of state, a negotiator for his nation, a federal programs administrator and a mayor. It's a very complicated task to try to perform these four functions at the same time. One or another should be selected. You can't be both administrator and negotiator, for example, to the same state from which you receive programs. It seems to me that, from a political point of view, something isn't working right. I conducted a number of interviews with chiefs who told me that they were in this system that they had to deal with and found it very hard to develop their own political initiatives because they no longer necessarily knew what their role was, since it didn't coincide with their conception of what a chief should be, based on what had been passed on to them historically.
As for the women, until 1985, as a result of the amendments made to the Indian Act by Bill C-31, an aboriginal woman who had married a non-aboriginal man lost her status. Starting in 1985, they were granted the right to retain their status. However, their children rely on a paragraph concerning an amendment made to the Indian Act under Bill C-31. They are classified as either type 1 or type 2, which I find abominable. I know some women who have told me that they are the daughter of so and so, but that, as they had married a non-aboriginal man, their children would not be aboriginal, whereas if they had married another one, they would be.
In a system of this kind, people define themselves under the act by means of a paragraph, which I find utterly terrible. I also know some aboriginal women who had a first aboriginal spouse with whom they had a child, then a second non-aboriginal spouse with whom they also had a child. As a result of the situation, one of their children would be able to pass on his status and the other not. And yet they have the same mother and were brought up the same way.
This is an aberration. Non-aboriginal women who married aboriginal men before 1985 became Indians under the act. In their case, their children don't depend on either a number or a paragraph in the act and can pass on their status without any problem. That's one of the fundamental discriminations. The amendments made to the Indian Act under Bill C-31 did not correct all the injustices of the act in question. This is only one example among many.
:
I'd like to start answering that question by telling an eloquent little story. At one point, I conducted a field study for my doctoral thesis in Puvirnituq, an Inuit community in Hudson Bay. My thesis concerned the administration of criminal justice and included a historical component to understand how the Euro-Canadian justice system had been imposed on the Inuit, in particular. There was also a component concerning the land, in which I asked them for their views on the administration of justice.
I explained my subject by saying that it concerned the criminal justice system. One woman interrupted me by saying the words “criminal justice”. She asked me what criminal justice was. I explained to her that it was punitive justice, our penal system. She answered that that was funny because the words “justice” and “punishment” didn't go together. I asked her what she meant by that. She told me that, for them, justice means doing good; punishment means doing bad.
I've always remembered that. As a result of going into criminology, I have developed a critical and suspicious look at our way of doing things, which doesn't work any better in the south or in the non-aboriginal communities. We really have to reinvent our approaches to social problems.
I often say that when a problem event occurs, whether you call it a crime or an assault—regardless of the name given to it—the major problem is that a justice system will always consider it a transgression. There has been a transgression of a code. In fact, before that transgression, there are two things. There's often something that precedes a problem situation that will be characterized as a crime, so problems that precede that transgression. The transgression also creates consequences.
So if you want my opinion, a true justice system should focus upstream from the transgression. In fact, it is important to know why someone hits someone else on the head. We won't focus on the transgression, but rather on why it happened. Can we take action to prevent people from hitting each other and help people avoid doing that? The other thing is that hitting someone creates consequences. Can we address those consequences?
So a real system, whether we call it justice or something else, is a system that takes into account the people in the situation, and the transgression is ultimately secondary. I know it may shock some people to hear me say that, but the further I go into my work, the more I assert, and am very sure, that we have to get away from the idea of a transgression against social standards and deal with the people who are caught in these social problems in order to support them. So we have to develop a network of assistance and support.
Going back to the issue of violence in the aboriginal communities, having met a lot of people who were brought up within these dynamics, I can tell you that men and women need support. There's nothing worse than a justice system that, in any case, operates in a completely different manner. Marie-Pierre can give you a lot of examples, but, in my field, for example, the notion of guilt does not exist in the aboriginal languages. So how do you translate it in court? You ask whether the person did it or not; that's how you translate the notion of guilt.
So we have to completely change our ways of seeing things in order to reinforce the idea of accountability instead. For example, a person admits that he was involved in such and such an incident, that he was responsible for that, he admits it, and so on. People need support. They don't need to be sent to prison.
People obviously have to be protected. The problem is different in an urban environment, but, in the communities, there are in fact natural protection areas that can be used. There are very promising initiatives for taking charge of male assailants who have problems. The male assailants aren't very happy people. However, it takes courage, initiative and creativity, and we have to go off the beaten path.
In the third report I'm preparing, on the community of Kuujjuaq, I came across an idea that I very much like and that I want to share with you. This idea has been used a lot by the people who work in political science. They say the problem with institutional reforms that we try to make is that we suffer from path dependency syndrome. Pardon me, my English is terrible. This path dependency idea is very interesting. It means that, when we're in an institution or an organization—whether it be the justice system, politics or whatever—we are always, like a hamster, stuck on our wheel, and we think of reform not just in terms of the logic of our system, but also in terms of the history and path of our institution.
So we always adopt reforms consistent with that logic and we become dependent on our own organization and the weight of its history. What does that mean? We are all caught up in this path dependency: you, me, Ms. Bouquet and everyone. We're always on a pathway and we always think in terms of that pathway.
I'll give you the example of the research I conducted on Kuujjuaq, where I interviewed a person—
I would like to take us in camera for a moment, so I need to save some time to do that.
I just want to thank the witnesses for being here and for giving us.... Obviously, we were not talking to people who are field workers; we were talking to people who are researching the whole cultural system. I just want to say one thing. Coming from a country that was colonized--many of us who come from the Commonwealth know what it is to be colonized--I understand very much what the aboriginal communities have suffered.
I was talking to a friend the other day and I was discussing the fact that we are hearing about violence and about the issues. This person lives in the downtown east side of Vancouver, and he said to me, “I'm sick and tired of all this whining.” This is what he said to me. He said, “You know what? Some people were stronger and they came and they took their land, so they've just got to live with that.” I listened to this and I thought, wow, where did you come from?
I think the whole concept at that time was that western civilization and Europe and Britain were all the powers of the world and they came and they took over the New World, and of course they knew best. They were the civilization and these people were savages. So they had to show them that their lives were wrong, the way they lived was wrong, and everything they did was wrong, and they had to tell them that they knew how they could live better. That was the essence of what colonialism was about, to come and tell other people that you knew they were just a bunch of savages, and you were civilized and you were going to tell them how they should do things.
The absolute need for “reculturalization” is an important thing. I know you talked about going west and seeing how things are. I know we're trying in small ways. It's absolutely not perfect. But I do know that every time the premier of our province, no matter what his political stripe--and I say “his” because we only have guys who are premiers--stands up, no matter where he is, and before he speaks, he says, “I want to thank the Salish Nation”--or the Musqueam Nation or whoever--“for having us live on their land.” It's a simple statement. I know I do it, and we do it all the time, and Mr. Martin used to do it. It's saying, I know I am here on your land and this is not mine. It reiterates the sense that we are here as people who came later.
A lot of work is being done by UBC on anthropology. They discovered the Hatzic Rock, and they did a dig in that area in Abbotsford, in British Columbia. They found, with carbon dating, that the aboriginal culture existed 40,000 years ago. They went back and found that 20,000 years ago the aboriginal people were trading all the way down the coast of the Americas. They were bringing in minerals and stuff that did not belong in British Columbia, and they found them in these digs.
The aboriginal people had hugely organized governments and huge amounts of trade went on. They were societies that were not perfect. I don't believe any society is perfect. But the point that one would decide that they are useless, and the fact that we have a whole lot of people now who are absolutely living with the idea that they are useless, and savage, and that whatever or whoever they are is absolutely unworthy, is something that it doesn't take five years to fix.
The only way we can start doing it is by actually listening, by learning, and I believe by helping to ensure that we give back that culture the respect it deserves, and say, you've got to have the answers; we can't impose them on you. That, I believe, is what we hopefully will be hearing as we go on. Everything we hear from everyone is usually reiterative of what went on.
But I think you have given us a much better perspective on the long term and the problems that aboriginal people will face. In the west there were many matriarchal societies among aboriginal peoples, and the lineage of the chief was handed down through the women, so this is not necessarily a male-dominated society. We see that things have changed because of the fact that many aboriginal people were taught that patriarchal societies were the ones that would actually always work.
Thank you for coming. I'm really pleased that you came, because looking at this through the anthropological lens and through the historical and cultural lens will hopefully give us a much better understanding of where we need to go as we come up with recommendations and as we write a report, which I hope will be sensitive and not the usual politically correct kind of stuff that quite often parliamentary committees put forward.
I think we have a real opportunity to change things. We have a real opportunity to make a difference to something that's been going on for so long, and I'm hoping this committee will have the courage to do exactly that.
Thank you for coming.
I'd like to suspend and go in camera, please, just for a few minutes.
I would ask those who can't stay to please quickly leave the room.
[Proceedings continue in camera]