 Thank you, Myra. We're going to move on to Trevor Stratton. And so diagnosed with HIV in 1990, Trevor is a citizen of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation near Toronto. He's the coordinator of the International Indigenous Working Group on HIV AIDS, coordinator for the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network, and a North America NGO delegate on the UN AIDS Program Coordinating Board. That's a lot. His work is international in scope, but he has a special focus on Canada, where injection drug use is driving the HIV and hep C epidemics among Indigenous populations. The Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network is the first NGO on the UN AIDS Board focused on Indigenous people. And this morning, Trevor is here to share his experience as a harm reductionist advocating for Indigenous people. Welcome. Thank you very much, Monique. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional territory, the Ghanawake Mohawk people. And I'd like to acknowledge our elder, Sedalia Sego, Ani. I am from Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. My mom was born and raised there. And my dad is fifth generation English Canadian. But I also have, in addition to Ojibwe blood, I have Mohawk blood. I have French blood and English blood. So that's a lot of fighting in Canadian history. All those groups fought together in various wars. And all that blood runs through my veins. What I do now, really, is what everyone is doing and fighting for the principle of nothing about us without us. And that is for Indigenous people as well. If you're going to have a women's conference, you don't have a committee of only men with no women to plan the conference. It's just common sense that is not applied to a lot of the groups that we deal with, including people who use drugs. A lot of times, we have to justify why we should be consulted at all. What do you have to offer? What do you bring to the table? So that's what we fight for as Indigenous people at the table. Because if you're not at the table, you could be on the menu. You won't know unless you're there. There's over 600 First Nations in Canada. It's extremely diverse. And in addition to First Nations people, we also have Inuit Aboriginal people and Métis Aboriginal people. And all of us live the legacy of colonization. Colonization did a lot of damage and put our health at risk and put our people at risk and caused a lot of trauma to our communities and to our people. But it's not just the people who directly experienced it. It's the multi-generational trauma that's passed down through families and through culture that we experience to this day. I want to really, I guess, what we're talking about is an issue of trust. And that is a central tenet of harm reduction as well. And in Canada, we've had the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Commission, which I would argue is a best practice. That's something that's very important. For one thing, to hear the Prime Minister of Canada apologize for residential school systems where Indigenous children were taken from their families and communities and taken hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometers away and put in religious institutions that showed very little compassion and love for human beings, to be quite honest. And through this Truth and Reconciliation Commission is where the action was taken after the apology. And so one of those recommendations is to recognize the traditional territory of Indigenous peoples when you bring people together. So thank you very much to the Harm Reduction Conference here, HR 17, for acknowledging and following one of the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That is very important to regaining the trust of Indigenous people. But it's also our nation states and our governments that don't have a lot of trust for Indigenous people. Most nation states look at the citizens as production units, units of production to contribute to the gross national product. And Indigenous people and communities don't really view their citizenry that way. It's sort of how do we live the best way? How can we live in the best way and be the best example to our families and to our communities? And walking in a good way is a really good way to support people. If you want to understand someone who may need to be connected to the healthcare system, it's important to just walk with them, listen to them, and understand where they're at, where they're coming from. What are they ready for? And when we deal with communities, what I've learned is that community readiness is important, too. With 600 First Nations and such diversity in Métis and Inuit people, it's important to understand where a community's at. And when we talk about harm reduction, it's important to talk about harm reduction within our cultural frameworks that already exist because our traditional values are perfectly aligned with the values of harm reduction in terms of the autonomy of the individual and everyone has their own truth. And it's really about helping people to find their truth because my truth may not be your truth, your truth may not be my truth, and yet it is our truth. To help someone find their truth is really how we look at harm reduction. It's not to judge people. I don't know if you've ever heard the expression to walk a mile in the moccasins of someone before even trying to understand, just be there with them. A lot of our response to addictions came from abstinence-based programming over alcoholism and alcohol use in our communities. And so a lot of the alcohol and drug workers in our communities, we really respect lived experience in indigenous communities. So someone that has gone through it and is on a path toward their own healing is very well respected as a drug and alcohol worker, but many of them, their experience is in alcohol. And the experience in the culture around alcohol is a lot different than drugs. And each drug, the culture around the drugs and the rituals and the ceremonies that go with drugs are very easily substituted. Those are very easy substitutes for our ceremonies and our traditions when people get together and you know, you work it and you roll it and it's all this ritual and ceremony involved. And that really rings true for indigenous people. And getting people back to their own belief system is very important. It doesn't necessarily mean digging back five or six hundred years to go to look at traditional spiritualism in indigenous communities. That is important for many of our people, but many of our people are also very Christian or they have their own beliefs. So to walk with them and to create interventions that are culturally appropriate and appropriate to the stage of readiness of the individual but not only the individual, but also for the community. And there are models. There's the community readiness model from the Tri-Ethnic Research Center at the University of Colorado. It's been around for about 15 years, but it's very good for helping communities to assess their readiness to implement a given, or react, respond to a given issue. And I traveled around the country helping communities to assess their readiness for addressing harm reduction. And the first question I'd ask was heard of harm reduction, and it was usually less than 50% in the room. Sometimes two hands went up. And then I'd talk about who knows what HIV AIDS is, and a lot of people didn't. Because we're in the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network we'd have to start at the very basics. Figure out where they're at. What do they know and start there? That's always been our approach. And the intersection between culture, law, and religion is key when dealing with indigenous peoples. For many years our traditions were outlawed. Our languages were illegal. Our ceremonies were illegal. And those people who retained those ceremonies they were the people who went back into the bush and practiced the ceremonies. So, for example, our respect and our place of honor for our two-spirit people or LGBTI community is a thousands of years old tradition where we had ceremonies and dances and even dialects. Our middle people had this. And so, having those traditions outlawed has been very traumatic for our communities. And when public health or when people come knocking on the door saying we've got the solution for you, knock, knock, knock. I've got a pill. We'll fix your community. There's a lot of distrust. And so many well-intentioned people have come and done research and not shared the research, taken it away and sometimes even used it against our people. So, there's a lot of mistrust in institutions, in hospitals, in schools, in prisons, in military, in hospitals. A lot of the institutions that most people in Canada would consider to be on their side. We look at it as mechanisms that have caused a lot of hurt. And I can use the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with their beautiful red uniforms in those hats. When most Canadians look at them, they think of the good heart and the well-meaning helper. And our communities, often, they're viewed as baby stealers and people who take our people away and put them in prison. You know, when you ask an indigenous person to respond or to talk about Canada's 150th anniversary, or Montreal's 350th anniversary, please take a moment to just try to understand where we're coming from and how we think of this legacy of colonization and of newcomers and settlers coming to our communities and how all of our laws were changed in a system that doesn't fit our people, has been imposed upon us and with that residential school and the multi-generational trauma, that's what you're dealing with when you're speaking to an indigenous person who may be using drugs. These are some of the context we have to take into consideration. We've done a lot of work in Canada around HIV and AIDS and around harm reduction in indigenous communities but under the conservative government they they didn't allow us to even mention the word harm reduction or submit any projects around harm reduction. So it really set us back in terms of harm reduction but there are some amazing work happening in the communities. It's just that on a national level we haven't, we've really lost a lot of time being conducting and helping people to get on the same page to share these best practices and yet we are resilient, we're still here. It's pretty amazing. Not only that, we're working internationally. As Monique said, the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network holds a seat on the program coordinating board at UN AIDS. Now they're actually saying the word indigenous. They're considering indigenous peoples as maybe a key affected population for HIV and AIDS and Hepatitis C. We have the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York where we go and we interact and we ask them to work with UN AIDS so we're trying to pull them together. We're trying to get the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to be integrated through United Nations systems such as UN AIDS and others and we've just incorporated a new international indigenous HIV AIDS community and we are a full partner of the Central Coordinating Committee of the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam coming up next year. But getting back to Canada Indigenous people do have a lot to celebrate. We can celebrate our culture. We can celebrate the strength of our resilience and the fact that we're still here and you know what? Our population is growing. It's the fastest growing population in Canada so we're currently 4% of the population but we're soon to be more. Right here in Montreal the Montreal Native Women's Shelter is doing some excellent work in harm reduction and reaching our Indigenous people women living with HIV and AIDS and just taking that harm reduction approach and starting where people are at and I would say and I think all Indigenous people agree that women are the backbone of our nations. If our women fall we're all doomed. Thank you.