 Welcome to the Catherine Graham Lecture on Aboriginal Policy. My name is Karen Schwartz. I'm an Associate Dean Research and International in the Faculty of Public Affairs. As we begin, allow me to take a moment to acknowledge that the Carlton campus sits on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. This lecture was established in 2009 to honor Catherine Graham, here in the front row, and her deep commitment to the sustainability of Aboriginal communities through public policy and citizen engagement. This is something she emphasized as the Dean of the Faculty of Public Affairs, which she served as from 2003 to 2009. This lecture provides a vehicle for examining a wide range of policy issues, cases, models, and tools related to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities across Canada. And we're very lucky that this coincides with Cureup and so that all the people from Cureup can take part in this lecture as well. It is now my great honor to introduce Joe McQuarrie, a Métis elder, who will welcome us today. I'd like to invite Joe up on the stage. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome you here. And also, I'm honored to be able to say the opening prayer for this session. And I was fortunate to talk with Catherine a bit during the meetings this week and learned a lot. I'd like to thank the Algonquin people for their hospitality as we meet on their land today. I would invite the creator. Before I invite the creator, I would like you all to stand to share a prayer with me. I'm very much looking forward to Roy's presentation as well. So now that we're all here, the creator, we asked you to be with us and to bring the spirits of our ancestors to meet with us tonight. And we ask for your blessings. We know that you brought us all here for a reason. And it's our privilege to be all together. We are reminded of the teachings of the seven grandfathers and try to practice their teachings as well as we can. We must respect each other and treat each other with respect as well. And give us the courage to speak our minds and also to open our minds so that we accept ideas and the statements of people without judging them. I would like to pray that Roy will be successful in his undertakings. His job seems to be a one of great envy for those of us who like books and research, things like that. We thank you for the privilege of having him here tonight as well. When we leave, we ask you, creator, to see that we return home safely. Big wish. I'd now like to invite Heather Dorees to the stage, who's going to introduce our speaker. Hi, good evening. My name is Heather Dorees. And I teach in the Indigenous Policy and Administration Program. I know this is a really exciting week for a lot of people with CureUp and all the other things that are happening on campus. So it's really my pleasure to introduce Rai Moran, who's going to, I think, continue the excitement of the week. As director of the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, it is Rai Moran's job to guide the creation of an enduring national treasure, a dynamic Indigenous archive built on integrity, trust, and dignity. Rai came to the center directly from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, where he facilitated the gathering of nearly 7,000 video, audio recorded statements of former residential school students and others affected by the residential school system. He was also responsible for gathering the documentary history of the residential school system from more than 20 government departments and nearly 100 church archives, millions of documents, and records, and all. Before joining the TRC, Rai was the founder and president of Yellow Tilt Productions, which delivered services in a variety of areas, including Aboriginal language preservation and oral history. He has hosted internationally broadcast television programs, produced national cultural events, and written and produced original music for children's television. Rai's professional skills and creativity have earned him many awards, including a National Aboriginal Role Model Award and a Canadian Aboriginal Music Award. Rai continues to advocate for survivors, Truth and Reconciliation with commentary in radio, print, and television. Rai is a proud member of the Métis Nation. Please help me welcome Rai Moran. I forgot to put this thing on before I got on stage here, so I'm going to wire myself up here. Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. And my goal in life is actually to have about a one-line bio. So I'm not quite there yet, but that's my goal. Elder, thank you so much for your beautiful words. And your beautiful prayer and your prayers for me as well. Sometimes I feel like I need them, so it's very appreciated. So we're going to be talking about something pretty serious tonight, I guess, rights and responsibilities in an era of reconciliation. And I think I'll warn us in advance that this is a very serious conversation. The truth part of reconciliation is essential. It's the starting place of the conversation. And while we cannot stay stuck in the past, we have to be absolutely 100% aware of the past and the effect that it has had on Indigenous peoples, on us as a country, and how that shapes our future. The concept of rights and responsibilities is also really central in this. And these are going to be repeating themes that we're going to explore throughout this presentation. Hopefully by the end of it, we're going to feel that we have that collective opportunity to be responsible for the healing in the country that's so necessary and to right some of these past wrongs that this is within our grasp to do. So why are we standing here? Why are we together in this room? It's a really important question, I think, that's to ask ourselves at the beginning of any time we gather. So you're here to hear me talk. Well, why am I even here? Because I work at the center. Well, where did the center come from? It came from the TRC. Where did the TRC come from? It came from residential school survivors. And residential school survivors have been at the heart of this conversation for a very long period of time. It's important to remember in this as we have this conversation about responsibilities is the grace with which residential school survivors have given us this opportunity to have this conversation. Survivors have not asked for this country to be torn apart. They have not asked for this country to be shredded. They've asked for accountability and responsibility and for us to somehow ensure that the harms perpetrated on them never occur to any citizen of this country, indigenous or non-indigenous, and never occur to anybody in this world, in fact. Because the effects of the residential schools have been so deeply damaging that no human being anywhere in this planet should ever have to experience what they did. So the Truth and Reconciliation Commission embodied this in those seven grandfather teachings that we heard our elders speak about. And it's that logo that you see there. And that first flame that we lit, the first fire that we lit out in Winnipeg in 2010, we're just a little shy of the seven-year anniversary of the TRC's first national event. It's that fire of respect. Because we believed at that time and still believe this, that in order to have this conversation of truth, it all starts with respect. And that's the path to healing. So we've taken these fires and we've put these fires at the middle of the center. And this is this fire that burns. We've lit seven fires across the country and now there's this fire that burns at the heart of the NCTR. I'm not gonna explain the whole logo to you, but I do wanna draw your attention to two particular points of this. And one is this idea that there's those birds in the middle of it. And those birds that are in the middle of that logo talk about this very important line from the TRC's mandate that says the truth of our common experiences can set our spirits free. So this idea is central in this work that we do. The truth is a liberating force. As difficult as it may be, as hard as it may be to listen to, it is liberating. And that third flame there, that small one there, that's about those children that aren't yet here. Those children who haven't yet been born. The ones that we do our work for today to give them a better world. Because right now we live in a society that is passing on a continuously degraded world and environment to our children. Yeah, we might be advancing in rights and stuff like that, but if we look at the actual health of the planet, I'm no confidence right now that my kids are gonna inherit a healthier world than I've seen it in my own life. The ponds that I swam in the kid aren't there anymore. The fish that I used to catch aren't there. The whole place that I used to hunt, none anymore. So this is a very serious conversation. And it may be one of the most, if not the most conversation that we're having as a country right now. How we're going to rectify these past harms, how we're gonna adjust this system that has been so damaging, not just to indigenous peoples, but to this very land that we live on here. So, the truth. So we're not the country we think we are. This is really true. I mean, many in this room may have a sense of indigenous peoples, indigenous identities, but when you take a step out these doors and you start asking some people on the street, who are indigenous peoples? What do you know about them? What traditional territory are you on? Can you say anything in any indigenous language? The knowledge level of Canadians is abysmally low. Only about 40% of Canadians right now are even aware of the fact that we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And my friends haven't believed me when I said that. We ran national bulls and they said, no, you're not right. I said, watch this. And we were in a restaurant one night and I walked over to some people in the restaurant. Have you ever heard of the TRC or the Truth and Reconciliation? Nope, I haven't. I just got my haircut in Ottawa, well, about a month ago or so. In the almost eight years that I've been doing this work, that barber was the first barber that I've had that I'd actually heard of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So he got a special prize, actually. Probably means that it's not just a matter of hearing about the TRC. It's a matter of understanding what the TRC was all about, what it said, what it did. And of course, in the context of the TRC, what we were all about was about examining and unpacking the residential school history and legacy. But even here, we're not seeing a full and complete picture of what the process of aggressive assimilation looked like in this country. So there's about 140 recognized residential schools in this country, from coast to coast to coast. Every single area of the country had residential schools. What doesn't appear on this map, though, is all the schools that ran as other forms of assimilative action, so the day schools and other forms of religious institutions. And there's about 2,000 of those schools across the country. So if we can imagine this map and we start to layer on a whole bunch of other dots, that's how full and complete the process of aggressive assimilation was in this country. Then we start to layer on top of that the pain and suffering that's been created by these schools. And there's a one to one kind of ratio that every single area of this country suffers from the effect and damage of these residential schools. And a lot of people still don't understand this. Like, we're still at that point. And the hard part about this conversation is that we use words that have meaning in sort of normal society, regular society, I guess. And it sort of trips us up sometimes in our thinking. So we say a school, right? We say schools and people think, oh, the school that I went to, right? But residential schools were completely different than that. We actually have to start replacing these words and say, call them assimilation centers or indoctrination centers. That's where the TRC's findings were on this. And there was very little about education at all, especially in the early period when they were more about indentured labor and farm servitude where indigenous peoples were seen as not having the skill or ability to survive in regular society. So they weren't gifted with the ability to learn and thrive like non-indigenous peoples were. And as we look at these school photos, I mean, some of these school photos don't look all that much different than some of the other school photos that existed at the time. But they tell a very different story. And they tell this kind of story about kids running away. So this is from the school up in Fraser Lake. And the TRC has documented about conclusively documented over 3,000 kids that died in the residential schools. But we know that the actual real numbers is much higher than that. We know that there's over 400 cemetery locations across the country that still need to be examined where sometimes, harshly, the bones of kids are actually coming out of the ground right now because they haven't been properly cared for or forgotten and left behind. And we can remember that when they were building the schools as part of the standard practice, unlike a lot of other schools in this country, it was normal, regular business to put a cemetery in right next to the school. That was part of the plan. So these weren't just schools. These are totally different type of school. We can also talk about other words like strap. So I don't know, some of the people in this room have probably been hit by a strap. Anybody been hit by a strap back in the day? What did it look like just out of curiosity's sake? Yeah. Look at that pig. Yeah? Look at belt. Look at belt, okay. Yeah. I know my dad talks about getting hit by a strap in New Westminster where he grew up. And it was kind of, it was about that long and about that thick. Schools used to have a school-issued strap, apparently there was policy on it. But when we talk about a strap in a residential school, I mean, this is the type of stuff that we actually see. So this is a strap that was actually handmade, made out of conveyor belts from the machines that used to run in the wood shop. This is found in the wall of the caretakers residence at the Kuchaching First Nations School. Those are actually blood stains on the end of that strap. So even when we use words like strap, sometimes our mind goes to a different place than what was actually happening in the residential schools. You know, the abuse even that happened in the residential schools is particularly harsh. So this is a really harsh slide. It's a super important one right now though. This next series of slides. A week and a half ago I was in Ottawa, we were at the Supreme Court. Trying to find out what was gonna happen with these records from this process, the independent assessment process, which was there to determine the level of harm and compensation that was awarded to residential school survivors for the serious sexual and physical abuse that happened in the residential schools. When we talk about abuse, it's really important to recognize just how serious this abuse was. So this is an abuse, I think I wanna call it crimes against humanity. State-enabled rape, state-enabled child abuse. And when we look at the harms and the effects, we see that the harms and effects on indigenous peoples is that attended residential schools in the most extreme basically loss results in a complete destruction of the person's self, all breakdown of a person's inner and personal identity. To put a fine point on this, which is where this history is so harsh, over 50% of the IEP claims were at the most serious levels, over 50%. And to put some numbers around this too, there's about 80,000 survivors alive in the country right now. There's about 40,000 survivors that had IEP claims. So half of the students that are alive right now had serious claims for sexual and physical abuse. About half of those had the most severe kinds of abuse affected on them while in the schools. So this is really serious stuff. But of course it's not just about the residential schools. A whole bunch of other stuff was happening at the same time and residential schools were one part of the overall context and the overall story. So this is of course the famous picture of the Battle of Batash, where Usmeti made our last stand. First use of the Gatling gun in the country. The deployment of troops by our newly constructed railway. So even the national fabric that we've built has been constructed sometimes for the purposes of direct purposes, oftentimes of suppressing indigenous rights. Destruction of the Buffalo and bison on the prairies and the forced starvation and the general starvation that resulted in the corresponding collapse of indigenous cultures and identities. The huddling of people onto reserves. Population declines 53 to 93%. I'm just talking about some of the population declines out west. Of course we've got the Indian Act, which has layered over blanket upon blanket upon blanket of legislation upon indigenous peoples that for many, many years and still continues to remove so many rights from indigenous peoples. The right to define who somebody is in a culture, the right to define who somebody is in a community, the right to write a will, the right to own property, the right to pass laws, the right to have ceremony. And you know the thing that bugs me the most, the thing that bugs me the most about, well there's a lot of things that bug me about the residential school system, but the thing that I think is so horrible about what was happening is as we were subjecting, as a country, as we were subjecting indigenous peoples in the First Nations, Métis, to the horrors of the residential schools, we were also systematically deconstructing all of the healing systems, all of the healthcare systems, all of the legal systems that existed to help communities get through these very difficult times traditionally. So it's been really a double whammy. And then the triple whammy on top of that is that as these, as communities were being deconstructed, non-indigenous peoples that were coming to this country were also being taught in many formal ways, that there was this inherent superiority of non-indigenous peoples as well. And it's gotten so much so that, you know, there's lots of people that I've talked to who attended the residential schools that they said, you know, we were so messed up in the schools that, you know, they used to play cowboy and Indian movies. And by the end of it, we'd actually be cheering for the cowboys, you know? It's how messed up the whole process of education was inside of these schools. So I'm gonna play a video, and it's pretty, it's kind of heart-wrenching. But at the heart of this video is actually one of the things that is perhaps, you know, the most shameful of all. And it's that attack on that relationship between the parent and the child. And that most sacred of all bonds. An attack on love and the right to love and the right to provide care to one's child. And the right to receive love from one's parent. All of us have been kids, and some of us are parents. And there is that bond, I've got two young kids myself. You know, there's that bond that you have with your children that is so sacred. It really defines, in many ways, who we are as humans, as human beings. Or it's just creation in and of itself, because all life gives life to its children. So it doesn't matter whether it's the deer in the woods or us as humans, there's love there. So this video talks about that attack on this most sacred of all elements of who we are as humans. I'll play it here for you. A question for you. How did your mom feel when she apologized to you? I want people where anything happened to me. I want to apologize to my family for what I put them through. I could tell my grandchildren, that I love them, but with my own children, I can't tell you one time without a meeting with the U.S. Justice Committee. And the facilitator went all around the room telling us, could you tell me what love means to you? Then when it came to my turn, I told them, I can't answer, I can't. She said, why? How can, my answer was, how can I give love to somebody that I never received? When I was a child, both my parents were in residential school. They weren't taught, they were not taught. They weren't taught of love. I wasn't taught what love means. To this day, I still, I get my own expression of what love means now. But years when I started my own family, I couldn't tell them I love them. I didn't know what it means. The question is, how can I tell my children before anything happened to me that I want to give them love, but I don't know how. I didn't know how the time. I put them through what I went through. I put them through hell and back because I went there with my own parents and then back up again. And I still, to this day, only one or two will talk to me. I think I heard my other children so much that sometimes they'll talk to me on a good day. Other days, they just won't have nothing to do with me. I want to know what I have to do in order for them to understand where I'm coming from and what happened to me when I was small. I had no love. I had nothing. I was brought up in residential school right from the age of five. I never left here until 1962. I moved from a clavicle to a new week and then I stayed here another two years. I never went home summertime. I'd like to know how I can say to my children with meaning and all the mirrors I missed that I loved them. I didn't, it wasn't me that put them through what they did, what I did. It hurts. It hurts me to think about what I missed. This really complicated problem that we've got in Canada. We've got this history that we're coming to terms with. The intentional, long-term, policy-driven destruction of indigenous peoples and indigenous cultures. And the harm that that has resulted in, of course, is felt right within communities and within families to this day. So as we're having this conversation about reconciliation, we have to recognize that it means different things to different peoples in different contexts. One of the fundamental things about conversation around abuse, which is what this is, is that the abused, the person receiving the abuse is in a position where they are having something taken from them. It doesn't matter what form of abuse it is. But something is being taken. There's violence being afflicted upon the abused. And you know, one of my friends, a survivor, asked me one day, he said, you know, right, you know, I'm 67 years old and I still can't figure out what it is that I've done wrong, right? It's a really fundamental question that we've got in this country. What is it that indigenous peoples have done wrong and how are we gonna heal out of this? What needs to change? So there must be a change in perspective. There must be a change in perspective but the way in which we view Aboriginal peoples. We cannot perpetuate the paternalistic concept that only Aboriginal peoples are in need of healing. And perpetrators are wounded and marked by history in ways that are different. Both groups require healing. How can a conversation about reconciliation take place of all involved and not adopt an attitude of humility and respect? So reconciliation does not mean keeping the status quo. It means some things that gotta go. So what has to go? Well, I think one way to enter into this conversation around reconciliation, the opportunity that we have as a country, we look at this definition that the TRC has provided us and something that runs very close to what the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples provided us as well. This is old knowledge. That there's a way of being in relationship with other people, other plants, other species on this planet that starts with respect. And you'll note here, and sometimes people get all cranky about the word reconciliation. They say, well, there's no, how can we talk about reconciliation when there hasn't been conciliation? Well, this really talks about it. We're talking about the establishment of mutually respectful relationships that recognizes that we don't really know what that looks like in this country yet. It's not necessarily in our inter-societal DNA so far. Yes, there's been examples of it. Maybe me as a Métis person, I'm an example of some sort of conciliation that happened. But we're talking about the establishment and maintenance of mutually respectful relationships. So this is a new path that we're on, and this is a path that people have been asking for for a really long period of time. And I think one of the things, one of the ways that we have to unpack this opportunity that we have is we remember again why we're all in this room together. So we go back 10,000 years ago, a bunch of us wouldn't be in this room. Who would be here? Indigenous peoples, right? Go back 500 years ago, bunch of us wouldn't be in this room. Who would be here? Indigenous peoples, right? So why are we here? Why are we here right now? Why we're here right now is, we collectively as a society believed that Canada was going to be a better place to raise our kids, perhaps, than what it was like back home. Believed that life was gonna be better somehow in the new world than what it was back home. Wherever that world may be, that might be China, that might be India, might be Scotland. But there's the idea that coming to this place would provide us with a better economic life, a better safe life, just a better life in general. And in most regards, that's been true for the mass majority of the population. But the question is, where are the safe places for Indigenous peoples in this? And what has the big exchange been? So where are the safe places for Indigenous peoples now? And I think we really have to ask ourselves that question as a society, right? So people have asked me before, they said, you know, look, Rai, like, why can't they get over it, right? Why can't they get over it? Like, you know, all these people came from all over the world and they came here and, you know, they got over it. You know, they fled, it was good. But where do you flee when you're an Anishinaabe person living in Anishinaabe territory, right? Where do you flee when you're a Haida person living in Haida territory? So do you go to the city? So let's say you go to Winnipeg, right? Ah, a little rough there. Most racist city in Canada, ooh, all right. You go back to your community. Well, communities aren't really good right now. Oil, water, advisories, lots of violence, lots of lateral violence, substandard infrastructure, substandard housing, right? Do you leave your country, right? Where are you gonna go? There is no safe place for Indigenous peoples as of yet in this country, truly. We're getting there. We're starting to create little bubbles of safety. But this idea of cultural safety that runs throughout many of these TRC's calls to action is all about recognizing that this country that we live in remains extremely dangerous for Indigenous peoples. And that's why we have a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Inquiry right now. Because we're talking about layers of discrimination in this country. Women face a different life than us guys do. And Indigenous women face a particularly difficult life in this country. Far higher rates of violence, far higher rates of being killed. So this remains a very dangerous place. It remains a place where Indigenous languages are not safe. We're losing our Indigenous languages rapidly. They are dying right now. And it has been the intent and policy of this country for a very long period of time to kill those things as well. So the opportunity is to create safety. And create safety that we've all collectively enjoyed in this society, generally. And it's not perfect yet, by any means. But to afford the safety that many of us have experienced, even my own Scottish ancestors on my mom's side of the family have experienced. But have not been afforded to the original inhabitants of this land. And that's where in the TRC's calls to action, the calls to action are lobbed broadly at all sectors of society. And they're specifically lobbed at individuals first. Because this is where we have that individual collective responsibility to start to create these safe places. And when we look at how this all unfolds and how this all impacts, it's at once both an individual, it's an organizational, and it's a national level responsibility for reconciliation. So we've all got this task. It's been called upon us by the TRC to try and take that cold, hard, long look in the mirror and say, what am I carrying around? How have I been educated? And what are the ideas that I'm packing with me? How does that translate into organizational practice? How does that translate into my little business unit? How does that translate into my faculty? How does that translate into this university? How safe is it for indigenous peoples here? How safe is it for indigenous ideas? You know, these are all really important questions. And then that extends, of course, onto the national level as well. What we see in the TRC's calls to action as well is that there's two big chunks of those TRC that calls to action. One really addresses the harms. That's the first half. And the other one is meant to set us up for a better future. I think it's really important to caution us as we have this conversation about addressing the harms that we don't rush to calling something reconciliation that's actually just basic equality as well. So indigenous peoples should not be faced with life expectancies that are less than non-indigenous peoples. Why is that? Indigenous students should not be worth less in the education system as they are than non-indigenous kids, right? But they are. And let's not get this confused with reconciliation. That's equality. And equality is the starting point of this conversation. So if we can get to equality, then we can start having a conversation about actual real healing and real reconciliation. Because we continue to live in a society that's actually quite equal. The other big piece with this as well though is that we've sort of been through this before, once or twice or 10 times with commissions and reports and other stuff. And the opportunity here now, here with this particular TRC, is to collectively hold ourselves to account and to collectively hold ourselves to hold our feet to the fire. Because as this quote says, history has taught us in a world without accountability and one in which impunity becomes entrenched. We've talked about all the great work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and the near complete failure of recommendations being implemented. Because who was actually holding society to account to actually achieve this very critical work? And the challenge with this process of reconciliation now, maybe we got a little more figured out this time, is that we're asking again, that individual, institutional or organizational and national level responsibilities. And we're in a very interesting time now as well because just I guess last year, we finally got the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples being adopted at least by the Canadian government. And what does this mean? Well, the commission has defined this UN Declaration as the framework for reconciliation. I think when we unpack this UN Declaration a little bit, I think it's really important to recognize what it says. And it says that these rights that are articulated in there are rights that have existed since time immemorial. They're not new rights, it's just an articulation of rights that have existed for a very long period of time. What's an example of one of those rights? The right not to be assimilated, forcibly or by other means, right? It seems like a pretty fair right, you know? Yet what have we done for so long in this country forcibly assimilated Indigenous Peoples? It feels like we're doing something really novel by saying, whoa, like, you know, you don't have the right to change me into something that I'm not, you know, let me choose, right? That's respect, that's a respectful way of being. So this UN Declaration and these rights that are articulated in here are absolutely central. And I think the opportunity now, and we're just having this conversation outside, is for the exercise of these rights to start coming into society. So if we have articulated rights, it's ours now to claim them as Indigenous Peoples actually. And it's ours actually to say, hey, these rights are being eroded. And this sounds kind of scary for this country. But we actually think once upon a time, we didn't have codified human rights in this country either. And codified human rights actually came out of the Second World War in the aftermath of mass human rights violations. And we believe now that we're actually in better shape now, you know, that we're trying to hold ourselves to account, we're trying to hold these beasts within us sometimes, this inhumanity of humans towards inhumans at bay through a codified set of laws and accountabilities so that universities have human rights officers and governments have human rights officers. And there's a mechanism by which somebody can say, whoa, my rights are being infringed upon. And this is the time right now that we're standing on the cusp of. We're 70 years out from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. So what is it gonna start to look like when we start actually having protected Indigenous rights mechanisms where Indigenous peoples can actually start to contest the abrogation of their rights? And why is that so important? Well, you flip to the back of the UN Declaration and it actually says that these rights that are articulated constitute the minimum level of survival for Indigenous peoples, the minimum level. So the right not to be assimilated, the right to have languages, the right to have access to the land, the right to maintain one ceremonial collection to the land. The right not to have lands invaded, you know. The right to be asked before something happens on one's land. The minimum level of survival to ensure that Indigenous cultures actually thrive because we rewind the story a little bit and we remember how much damage has already been done in this country. So this is a time of rebuilding and it is a time of actually changing how we're in relationship. So I wanna give you a little bit of a window into something that's coming too. And this is important because that's what we're trying to do at least. And this is what the country is trying to do right now as well and it's exciting actually. Because we're saying, look, we need some accountability frameworks in here. So right in the middle of the TRC's calls to action are a very powerful set of calls asking for the creation of a national council on reconciliation. And what this national council is meant to do is as you can see here monitor, evaluate and report annually to parliament on post-apology progress. Now what's central in this is that there's a lot of people sometimes that have criticisms of this whole reconciliation process that we're going through and saying, ah, it's all just about getting along nicer, isn't it? Not about feelings. And it is some of that, for sure. But it's also about addressing the very real inequalities that continue to exist in the society. So this national council is all about actual overall responsibilities for addressing those gaps and rectifying those gaps. Because those gaps are those barriers to realizing actually who we are as a country, realizing who we are as indigenous peoples and actually starting to meaningfully, meaningfully take the steps necessary in order to change these past actions that we've had in this country. So the good news in all of this is that in the words of Senator Marie Sinclair, you can't change the past. You can't change the past. But you can change two things about it. Your level of understanding and how you understand it and what you're gonna do about it, basically. So the past has happened in this country. There is no going backwards. But the future does remain as yet unwritten. And broadly across the country right now, what is exciting is we are seeing people rally to the TRC's call to action. I think in a way that we haven't seen in other levels, in the aftermath of other commissions or inquiries. But the opportunity here that we've got is to focus not just on the feelings of the relationship but the actual structure of the relationship and ask ourselves, are we structurally in the right relationship yet? Do we have the right structures in place to allow this relationship to flourish? And that's where these UN declarations and these rights and these responsibilities that we collectively had to create these structures is so central in this. It's so central in this. So I'm gonna play a little more video here. And this is also from TRC activities and events. And I think the video really speaks about the future. It speaks about this opportunity that we've got to create something that we haven't yet seen in this country. I think the opportunity that we've got is to create something that might actually dazzle us all, to actually start to realize knowledges and systems that have been here since time immemorial that we've actually never even begun to really meaningfully explore in terms of what that means for society or where they've permeated society. We've taken them for granted. So let's watch this video and then we'll come back for a couple more slides and then some questions. All yours fill us with deep regret. But as we know, regret and apology is not enough. The test of that regret and that apology, we know will be our actions in the days ahead. We are in the midst of a long and painful journey as we reflect on the cries that we did not or would not hear and how we have behaved as a church. We travel this difficult road of repentance, reconciliation and healing. We commit ourselves to work towards ensuring that we will never again use our power as a church to hurt others with attitudes of racial and spiritual superiority. The commission chair, the eloquent Mr. Justice Sinclair, borrows a phrase that was used by the leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement. That phrase is keep your eye on the prize. That sets a challenge for all of us, indigenous and non-indigenous, commissioners and citizens. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission will help define the prize. We as Canadians, as citizens, have to mobilize the eyes and help the larger Canadian population both see and act. Reconciliation in this context means coming together as a whole with one purpose being to hear and to heal and then a critical common purpose which is to move forward together. And if we fail to do that, if we fail to go beyond apology and regret, if we admit the truth and ignore the reconciliation, that would be to repeat the profound offenses of the residential schools themselves. I believe that Canada, as a broad and generous country, could find the will to repair the damage of that past and build new partnerships if enough of our citizens know and if their eyes are turned to the prize. End with this poem here. I read this poem, sometimes almost daily, actually. And I'm gonna freely admit that for some reason I'm having the biggest mind blank on who wrote it. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Read it, Joe. Thank you. Ha ha ha. Oh, it's sitting here, I was like, yeah, it's, it. But what does this say, you know? What does this say? I think what it says to me oftentimes is this very confused place sometimes that we find ourselves in as indigenous peoples when we're trying to explain some of this history and what it means to us and we're trying to explain some of our world views. That's this idea of the scrambled ballad. Somehow, somehow, the opportunity and reconciliation is to create a country in which indigenous peoples don't have to feel like they have to speak different ways when they're speaking. Where indigenous world views, traditional knowledge, traditional practice, ways of being, ways of being in relationship can be spoken about freely and not in this confused kind of fugue state that we're in right now. And that's not necessarily going to be easy and it's gonna take some time. But that is truly the opportunity that we have in this process of reconciliation is to start to welcome old ways of doing things into this new way of being as a country. So that's it for me and thank you for listening to me. Thank you very much. I think that the path to 100% awareness of the past and the effects on indigenous people is gonna take us a while and it's going to be a journey and hopefully we've started on that path in some ways today. So questions, we have two microphones. If you wanna come up to the microphones and ask your questions, that would be helpful so everyone can hear and we'll open the floor. Great. Thank you first for sharing this with us. I really found it very powerful. My name's Zanika Buske and I'm a grade 11 student at Lisgare Collegiate Institute here in Ottawa. And my question for you is how can we engage students within schools to be part of this reconciliation process and what do you think is the best way that we can do this so that every Canadian is engaged and every Canadian is informed? Super good question. I think what Reverend Stan McKay talked about there in that quote is adopting an attitude of humility and respect. Truthfully, I think that's the starting point in this journey. And I think learning how to listen is essential in that. And what does that mean in terms of engagement? Well, I think it means recognizing that we don't have all the answers and that we gotta get a lot more information before we start coming up with answers. So helping people find good resources is really good and good authentic resources right now written by Indigenous peoples or by Indigenous organizations I think is really essential. I think we're really gifted right now in terms of where we are as a society by a lot of really amazing Indigenous voices being out there. So be it from listening to Tribe Called Red to Richard Wasagami's or reading the TRC's reports even although they can be a little dry. It's really an important starting place. And then I think what's important too is maybe looking for the questions and not necessarily for the answers as well because this is really complicated stuff and it takes a while to unpack this. Good thing as well is that you know you even look at what's happening at these universities there's some amazing Indigenous peoples at places like this now. And it's not as hard to find great Indigenous peoples anymore and a lot of schools have got programs to bring elders and that kind of thing into the class. But there's that obligation I think too is that while Indigenous peoples can be the teachers there's that obligation to kind of start to meet us halfway or to start to do some of that foundational work as well. So that's where dialogue and engaging and watching films and there's like there's such amazing films. I mean, be it on residential schools or be it on a host of other areas there's just a lot of good stuff out there. So that's probably what I'd recommend. Yeah. Thank you. Other questions? You wanna come up to the microphone please? I wasn't gonna say anything. And I just wanna respond and come back to this talk about elders for example who I'm also a part-time student here in Indigenous Canadian Studies. And I've done a lot of research. So there's a couple things that I'd like to bring up. One is that we have elders who are in the schools and last year some of the elders who I heard through the grapevine were being so heavily taxed by the government that they're in shock. They wanted to come out to the schools, they want to share the story, they wanna be in support and yet the government continues to punish them by taxing them when they shouldn't be taxed but they are. I mean is that not a form of reconciliation on some level that they would be protected from a system, that a colonized system that has told us that if you want these freedoms and equality you're going to have to pay for them. And I see it as almost a form of punishment that's coming down the line. So that's one thing that really bothered me that I heard last year coming from elders and they're kind of scared. They wanna stay away because it's like they're burdened with monies they don't have to pay for this. That's one thing. The other thing that I wanna speak about is, sorry I think it was Mulroney who, am I incorrect? I'm not sure. Who spoke about the failure of truth and reconciliation. This country has already experienced a failure on a big scale. Most of my research has been around the First Nations in Newfoundland and Labrador, the Beotics. And the genocide that has gone on and I also wanna recognize the neutrals and I realize there are others in this country who've been wiped out and erased. And my research is about how has that impacted Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. I'm from Newfoundland. My ancestry is non-status Mi'kma. And again, I don't wanna carry on too long but the Hollaboo Band that was initiated in Newfoundland 10 years ago and Harper went and shook hands in Newfoundland with the Chief and he thought, oh, you know, maybe there'll be 5,000 of them. I mean, it's not going to be a big deal. And within one year, there was over 130,000 of us that applied for status. 70,000, if not more, are sitting in a drawer and we were all denied anything to do with status. There's something majorly wrong in some ways in that we're talking about truth and reconciliation and there's some major components that have not been truly dug up. And I know almost any Mi'kma I speak to will know about the Beatics. I don't have to say anything. They know it because they were blamed for murdering the Beatics. And it was written in the British and I'm going on, but what I'm trying to say, I guess, is the impact of a genocide on people, in particular Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, has been always a curiosity for me. And we've seen the severity of a province that basically for most of my life, I felt if Newfoundland sank, nobody would care. And fortunately, we were built on a big rock so they couldn't get rid of us. So thank you for listening. Thank you. I'll just respond really quickly. Be it taxation or be it burden placed on indigenous peoples in different forms. Just as a caution, I think, and I don't know if anybody in the room is experiencing this, but I know when I talk to a lot of my friends, there can be a type of fatigue that sets in in terms of some of these conversations and stuff. That's where we talk about whether it's learning with humility and respect. It's really important because sometimes I think what ends up happening is we end up having to teach on the defensive kind of thing and advance our rights or advance our ideas or worldviews on the defensive. And I think the opportunity is, or there's another point is some of my friends say, oh, look, this big organization, there's 300 people and I'm the only indigenous person. I get asked every single question about every single indigenous thing going. Plus I got all my job to do, plus I have all my community work plus all this sort of stuff. It's really tiring, it's really tiring. So that opportunity now is that kind of meet us halfway kind of opportunity. There's great books out there, there's a lot of material, the TRC reports and that's so important in this whole conversation because be it elders, be it even staff and institutions or organizations, it's fatiguing actually because it's especially, I mean, especially because we talk about that safety and stuff like that. It's not like you've got it necessarily a safe place to escape to. I mean, lots of my friends, they go into the drug store, the grocery store in Winnipeg, security falls them around and stuff like that. I had a friend who had to stop running because every time you go for a jog in the morning with his hoodie on because it was cold, he would get stopped by the cops. So he had to stop running like he said, God, you're like, I'm a healthy guy, I wanna run but couldn't do it because every time he was getting harassed, you know? So it's the kind of stuff that it's still a complicated time and I think the issues of what have we benefited from genocide, right? I think it's really important to remember that even in this history that we've got, the society that we've built, there's already a lot of destruction that already happened. So it has been the destruction of indigenous cultures that has enabled us to build the society that we have. It has been the access to the resources and the lands that indigenous peoples formerly occupied that allowed us to build this great system of wealth that we've had, you know? Build this building and pave our roads and stuff. So that's the opportunity is to start unpacking some of this and understand who's won, you know? And who the winners are and who hasn't won in this context, so you had a question. My name is Edward Atragi. While I was sitting there, my heart was thumping out of my chest. I can understand the enormity of what happened and my only contact with the native folks is that I spent three weeks in Alberta with the Stony tribe of the Blackfoot Nation and there I came to understand that there was a gift that is offered to us by the indigenous people that cannot be acquired in any institution that is created by the settlers, the new settlers. It's no matter how lofty it is, it cannot be created. And so here is my observation. I was born in India and I have heard this expression several times that to every dark cloud, there is a silver lining. And I see that this crisis opens the door for all of us to grow in our spirituality. And one way we can do it, which I propose to you, and I want to hear your opinion on that one, we brought native children into European culture. We took some steps a while back to require that people who work in the government shall speak both languages, English and French. Would it not be worthwhile for us to say, every individual who hopes to work in the civil service in the government, whether federal or provincial, must spend one year in total immersion with a family on a reserve. I think this is what would change the culture of this country, bringing indigenous people into Western society is trying to force them again into our culture. But what we want to do is introduce Western folks into native culture, and what better way to do it than to have them actually live and learn while they are on the reserve. Yeah, thanks for that. Huge opportunities and when we look at the principles of reconciliation issued by the TRC, I think principle eight is that the perspectives of traditional knowledge keepers and elders are essential in the process of reconciliation. Call to action 57 also calls upon all public servants to better understand and be able to work safely with indigenous peoples and understand the UN Declaration and all that. And those are very ambitious calls actually. The idea of bringing languages into all of this is absolutely essential as well. And the thing is, part of the reason why the French language is still here in Canada is because we value it and we actually spend money on it. We force companies to actually put it on their cereal boxes. We're not doing that with indigenous languages. We're not valuing indigenous languages at all. We throw a little bit of money at them every now and again. Canadian heritage, a little bit of money. There's no actual legislation that protects indigenous languages. There's nothing that requires companies to produce materials in indigenous languages. And there hasn't been a sufficient amount of funding to arrest the erosion of indigenous languages. So one of the other TRCs calls to action is actually for a indigenous languages act and pertinent Canadian heritage and the federal government is actually starting to work on this and they're gonna be going into consultations here in the next little bit and that's good news. But the challenge always is that what we've got in this country though, in terms of your idea of taking people and putting them in indigenous communities, so depending on how you count us indigenous peoples, there's only about three million of us and there's 35 million Canadians. So if I do the math, there's a bit of a disparity in terms of number of houses. So we gotta figure out another way to do it kind of thing. And that's where, you know, hoping and celebrating the growth of indigenous cultural achievements and authentic indigenous peoples in a variety of cultural spaces, presentations like this, and then with a lot of non-indigenous people starting to really look for that material too, that's really essential because I think we've, we've recognized in the calls to action, we've recognized for a long time, like we can't do this on our own and there's just not enough of us to kind of do it. So this is where it's, if we're gonna heal, we've gotta do it collectively and that's where it's a Canadian challenge. It's not an indigenous challenge in a way. Could I come back? Yeah. All you need to do is actually change 1.5% of a community to make the switch to tilt it in the right direction. You don't have, you don't have, this is a well-known fact. You don't have to change the whole community. All you have to do is just change 1.5% of it and that's possible for the native people to do it. Okay, I'm gonna keep that in mind actually. That'll be our target, yeah. Yes, thank you. In the spirit of, what are we calling it Dr. Schwartz, the Research Institute of Original Ethics Research Institute. What's the University Institute on the Ethics of Research with Indigenous People? Oh, there you go. That sounds fancy. What is your opinion and any advice that you have on managing to keep the plurality of indigenous peoples in Canada or in regards when approaching, both in academia when approaching research and both with the government when going to the negotiating table and drafting these different agreements and keeping that plurality? So I think it starts kind of in a simple place where we always add an S to people, right? So it's indigenous peoples. When we start there, the rest kind of follows actually because there's lots of indigenous peoples, lots of different communities and stuff. And that's I think one of the most important parts is and that's something that anybody can learn. Anybody can learn traditional territories, whose land they're on, whose land they wanna work on, you know? And then the opportunity there is just to start to try to understand who to talk to there, you know? And it's a good process. And I'll give you a little example. I'll give you a little example and it has nothing to do with research at all. It has to do with building a hut up in the mountains actually. But a really good friend, he's a mountain climbing guy. And he wanted to build a hut up on this peak kind of in the middle of Vancouver Island and there wasn't any huts up there. But he knows that times are changing and that you can't just walk into the woods anymore and put a hut up and this was gonna be an alpine club in Canada and hut. So there's 13 communities all around that hut and he sat down and he met with each one of them, you know, it took a long time. Took a better part of two and a half years because some of the communities it was kind of difficult to get a hold of and required a lot of trust building and relationship and dialogue. But coming out of this hasn't only been a whole bunch of community support for this hut where there's this collective sense of ownership but there's also been this whole process of rediscovery about the old times when young kids used to get sent up in the mountains to do their spirit work and that sort of thing. And actually a number of the ceremonial sites that are still up around this hut and how this hut has actually become a process and opportunity for reconciliation amongst all these kids and what it was, it was actually residential schools that interrupted those kids going up into the mountains there. So it's, I guess the moral of the story there is, is that, you know, you can take the example of writing a paper or building a hut and the opportunity is to build relationships and to build meaningful, lasting relationships and to establish those relationships. And I think as we establish those relationships we start to learn like our friend had, you know, they experienced it three weeks in a community. We start to realize that there's this untapped richness that we've got in this country that's kind of just waiting to be felt. And it's just a matter of doing that with research, doing that with huts. Thank you very much for that talk. I very much appreciated it and for the work that you and your team have done. And my question is, is although you I think painted how the truths of Canada are still coming out, in some ways we are leading on these types of discussions. And I wonder what other regions or nations have maybe reached out to you and your team on what this process looked like and how other similar processes may occur in other regions. We have colleagues that work in Greenland and they've talked about a truth commission but not a reconciliation commission and how your teams actually may be helping other groups come to similar processes. Yeah, it's a really good question. So I'll talk about a couple of different examples. I'll talk about something happening here in the Americas and then I'll talk about something happening down in Africa. So we had a delegation that came up from Cote d'Ivoire. They had finished a couple of truth commissions down there because the times have been pretty rough. And they came to us trying to understand the best practices in preserving the record that had been created by the truth commission. And we had a really good visit. We shared a lot of information. It was a UN-sponsored delegation. At the same time, underlaying that conversation is a much more fundamental conversation about our opportunity as a country as well to recognize sometimes the very privileged position that we hold in the world. Because, I mean, we had our challenges collecting documents during the TRC's mandates and we had laws that got in our way and sometimes a little bit of stubbornness and stuff like that. But we had documents to collect, right? Now the challenge down in Cote d'Ivoire right now is, you know, civil society has been so thoroughly eroded by conflict and everything that it's hard to even have trust that the deposit of records into an institution would actually work and that the records won't actually be destroyed. Now that said, I mean, I was just in the Supreme Court a week and a half ago trying to fight the destruction of records here in this country by government or, you know, by a variety of parties. So we're not immune to it here either. The truth is kind of, you know, challenging for a country. So there's that kind of thing that's happening in the world and transitional justice efforts, you know, these big-scale transitional justice efforts are really challenging for nation-states. You know, people often talk about South Africa and what happened in the aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There was a plan to have something like a national center in the aftermath of the South African TRC. There was the plan to have different hubs that would hold the different records. And that never materialized because there was a bunch of, you know, politics and shady politics and a bunch of the records were locked up, very similar to what's happening here in this country. And some of their efforts have been stymied as a result of that and in conversation with folks down there, they've said, you know, things are even worse in some ways than they have been, than they were at the time of the Truth Commission. On the flip side of things, so, you know, I think a conversation that I had with a diplomat, actually, and I'm heading down to Washington next week to have some conversations down there. And we had a conversation at the Organization of American Stage, which is kind of like the UN for the Americas. And I was sort of debriefing with this person, and they said, yeah, that was such a transformative event that we held because we were talking about human rights and we were basically up there lambasting Canada, more or less, for our past and our history. But most of the other nation-states in the Americas were flabbergasted that that was actually kind of permissible. Usually it's always the other way around in these international contexts where it's like, wow, we're doing so good and we're doing all this great stuff. And to actually have a group come up, sponsored by Canada, paying tickets arranged for, that came up and then slandered Canada heavily in front of all the other nations of the Americas, was actually pretty good. And a lot of the other nation-states said, wow, like you guys are actually talking about stuff in a way that's not being talked about in other places in the world. We even looked south of the border. I mean, the conversations that we're having about Indigenous peoples here in Canada are not happening, south of the border at all, right? So we're on to something here. We're on to something. And it's painful and it's difficult. But that's where I get some hope is that I get the hope through seeing the change and through seeing the change through the learning and through the appreciation and the understanding and the empowerment of Indigenous perspectives and peoples and us starting to become, or striving to become more respectful. And that's good, you know. Other questions? Thank you very much for your talk. It's very quite profound. As I'm sitting here listening, I'm thinking how do we move from a perspective of deficit on Indigenous people in Canada, highest suicide rates, lowest educational achievement to an asset perspective? One where, you know, we are valuing culture, land, like all of the language, all of the parts of the culture, because too much of what even people who think they know about Indigenous culture in Canada seems to me about the deficits as opposed to the assets. So in my opinion, I'm sure there's people in the room that got a lot to say about this. I think A, it starts with becoming much more trauma-informed as a society. So that's like step one. So, and that's something that everybody wins from. Understanding trauma, the effect on trauma, how that trauma has passed intergenerationally, we all experience trauma in our life in some form or another, you know. And becoming more attuned to how trauma plays out in societies and especially in the scale of the trauma that has been inflicted upon Indigenous peoples should make one more empathetic and more understanding. So that's a first kind of starting place. And then I think one of the other fundamental things too is you're right, moving from an idea of deficit to empowerment, you know. I mean, the biggest thing that a lot of Indigenous communities have been saying forever is, we know what our communities need, we just need the cash to do it kind of thing. Right? Or we need the allies to help us. Right? So it's starting to recognize that, and it's a whole bunch of different ways. I mean, it's starting to recognize elders as PhD holders, right? And recognizing that there's other systems of knowledge that need to be honored and respected. And that's again, that humility and respect, kind of, you know, that's so important in this. We can get to that point, you know, then we'll start to be able to have better conversations because, you know, the deficits-based approach, it's the exact same situation that was happening in residential schools, that there's a problem that needs to be fixed. The big thing is that Canada's not fixed Indigenous peoples, nor will it ever, right? Canada needs to start to move, Canadians need to start moving into that position of allyship, and not for us, but with us, right? And that's essential, you know? Then the gifts come, then the growth comes, then the empowerment comes. We should have a question. Hi there. You've referred earlier to the level of awareness of the truth and reconciliation among the Canadian population generally, but have you done any polling in terms of within Indigenous communities themselves what the level of awareness is? And you also made some references to how busy elders are these days and what a draw and how many incredibly talented and gifted and articulate people there are prepared to engage in these kinds of conversations, but what is being done or can be done in terms of equipping not only people making sure that Indigenous peoples are as aware of this, but are equipping them to have these conversations with each other and with the rest of the people here to make sure that this all happens as quickly and as deeply as possible. Yeah, so on the awareness of the TRC thing, I think what is important to recognize, and I've heard this, is that there's this sort of further away you move from the border, there less awareness there is of a lot of this newfangled reconciliation business and stuff, because a very real comment that a lot of people say to me is this, how is this doing anything to improve my life today? Right? And that's a very real and fair comment. Super real and super fair, because I think we have to remember that there's a lot of communities that are still in extreme states of crisis, where the primary issue of the day isn't having these sort of lofty conversations, it's about responding to the latest suicide, or the E. coli or the super bug resistant E. coli that's showing up in the water supply, or the fire that's on the community, or the young woman who's just gone missing or whatever it is. So it's, and we talk about this with health, we talk about this with education, I mean it's hard to be healthy when you're just worried about the roof over your head and basic standards of living and stuff. So, and that's where the country is both faced with a big challenge right now and that we've kind of got a double debt coming due, we have to repair the crisis, plus we have to build the future, right? And that's where indigenous leadership is being especially taxed, between do we respond to the crisis? Well, yes, we have to, but there's also all of this other stuff, an advancement of rights and the big pipeline that's gonna come through the community and stuff, and that's where chiefs and council, I mean, God, like Canadians often don't appreciate how hard and difficult that job is, because it's the three o'clock phone call from the police officer talking about a community member that's perhaps drowned in the river to nation to nation dialogue with INAC the next day. So, the one thing though, and on the flip side of that too, I mean, we shouldn't also, it's important to not overestimate the level of understanding of the harms of residential schools within indigenous communities as well. There's a lot of people out there as a result of the abuse and the silence that inevitably comes after being abused, where a lot of families haven't talked about it, a lot of people are playing out the symptoms of the trauma, but aren't having the conversations about why the trauma is occurring. Communities might not necessarily be having that conversation, there's some communities that are way far down the road on this, and then there's other communities that aren't talking about it at all, right? And just like what's happening in mainstream schools, residential schools aren't in the curriculum in a lot of places as well, right? So, there's knowledge gaps, you know, broadly, and we have to remember this is a very new conversation as well, you know, the TRC, you know, I don't know what percentage it was, but it was a very high percentage of people that we spoke to that had never shared their story with anybody before. So we're at the beginning of this journey, we're not anywhere close to the end of it. And then you asked another question about, ah, equipping people, yes, that's right, sorry. Yeah, equipping people, you know, I guess what I'll say about that is, I'll just say this is that I got a lot of really strong friends, really strong survivor friends, really strong helper friends that have been helping for a long time, and have told me that, you know, when they have to stand up in front of a room like this and share their story, it's just as hard today as it was before, you know, they might be more practiced at it, they might be maybe more polished at it, but in order to do it well, oftentimes, they kind of got to go to that difficult spot. And the harm doesn't stop either, too, you know. You know, again, I come back to that Supreme Court case, I mean, some of the survivors that were there with me, the very dear friends of mine, you know, we're sitting in the courtroom crying because of, you know, what people were saying about them, right. And that's where we're in this time right now where, you know, people are being talked about, but not talked to, you know, that's hurtful, that's a form of hurt. People have been asked to perform a lot of healing work, and sometimes, you know, there's the cup can only take so much. You know, there's a lot of health supports that I know that, you know, worked alongside of us in the TRC, and I mean, there are neat accounts like now, right, you know, because it's been so tough. At the same time, same time, though, they continue to do the work, right, and they soldier on, and that's the thing is, it's like, and that's this thing about privilege and stuff like that, right, is that like, the challenge is, you don't get to flip some of these switches on or off, it's not like you just get to walk away from this conversation, you know, it's like, it's happening in the community, it's happening in your home, it's happening in your life, it's happening in your family. So, the resilience and the strength, back to our other question that we had, you know, the fact that Indigenous peoples, as a whole, have made it to this point is remarkable, right, and that speaks to strength and that's why we talk about survivors, you know, it has taken a lot, a lot to get here, you know, Senator Sinclair often talks about, you know, he's amazed that there's survivors in the audience because they're not supposed to be here, right, you know, the intent was, so it's pretty harsh stuff, I guess, right, so. So, we're very close to being out of town, out of time. And I was rambling there, I was rambling, I was getting on a roll. So, the last question goes to you, and I will ask you to keep your answer a little bit shorter. Sure, sorry, yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for your talk, just two quick questions, I'm wondering if you could give us a status update on the TRC archive and also talk about what are some of the future potential roles that you see the archive playing in the reconciliation process. Okay, 30 words, right? Okay, 35. Gonna try it. So, the TRC archives have been transferred to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, big process. We've applied for a CFI grant, $8.2 million. Hopeful that we're gonna get that, we found out on June 20th, so everybody keep your fingers crossed. The information is full of private information, personal information, very sensitive information. We're working on a researcher access protocols here. The goal is to share that database out, but we have to be very sensitive to the personal information that's contained within them. And the goals of that CFI application are to run some de-identification processes, deep archive the statements in particular, and to start to sort of aggregate the collection in more research friendly ways. It's already very highly organized, but it is across multiple databases, so we've been doing a lot of work to kind of pull the databases together and to make it more synergized in a way. It's all digital. The archive does not exist really in paper format at all. It's copies of digitized records, so that should enable broad dissemination of the information once we get the privacy and the access pieces figured out and the security around all of that, and the protocols around all of that. So the potential with this is, I don't know, I think it's very vast, certainly to fuel research. It's a very powerful tool in a variety of areas, be it health, law, justice, policy, you name it. And it is the record of indigenous rights violations as well, so it has the potential to fuel litigation, I think, which is gonna be great. And it has the potential to support gladew decisions or gladew reports that are being made. And I think a very exciting potential too is to start to hook the collection up into other collections as well. So we're having an active conversation with the Manitoba Center for Health Policy to see how we can get our data, which is the historical data hooked up with their contemporary data that requires the development of these personal identifier numbers and everything like that, but to get these things linked up so we can start to understand the historic through to the contemporary harms and how this is playing out in the lives of Manitobin specifically, but more broadly at that level. Was that short? And that was a great last question. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have a small token of our appreciation and still don't go anywhere. Laura, I understand you also have a... Okay. Thank you. For joining us on Monday as well as today. And I'm the program assistant for Cura or the Research Ethics Institute, which Karen got down pat there earlier, amazing. Sometimes I even mix it up, but I just wanna say thank you so much for your words. I mean, this whole entire week has actually been somewhat of a ceremonial experience for myself, all of our speakers, all of our participants. And in fact, this job kind of came to me. I didn't even go out looking for this job. So it seems that a lot of the things in my life are, they kind of just come to me rather than me going out looking for them. And so this gift came to you. And I would like to... Thank you. That's great. Thank you. I just have a few more things I need to say to wrap up. As you know, this year is Carleton's 75th anniversary. And so there have been all kinds of activities going on because of the 75th anniversary. In terms of the Faculty of Public Affairs, we have a current lecture on September 15th. That'll be our next event. We will have Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal coming to speak at that event. So hopefully many of you will come. And if there are other events, you can go on carleton.ca backslashfpa and you can find out about all the events that we hold. And thank you very much for coming and have a very good evening.