 Welcome, everybody. It is Thursday morning, February 3rd. And we are General Housing Military Affairs. We're picking up testimony on H96, which is a proposal relating to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Development Task Force. With us today, we have several witnesses, and I'd just like to get right to it. This is, I imagine, everyone has seen or has had access to the amendment that's been proposed. We are at a process still of taking testimony before we start working on marking up the bill. So what's proposed is just that. It's a draft. It's a proposal. I'm not sure where this journey will go, but we're starting our focused work on it today and for the next several weeks. So with that, I'd just like to turn the microphone over to Carol McGranahan from the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs. Welcome back, Carol. Thank you all. Good to see you all. Thank you also for inviting me to give some feedback on the draft bill. I apologize ahead of time that I don't always read bills the same as others do, and I'm certainly not a lawyer. So I would like to start by saying that the Commission had met in a two-day workshop with the International Center for Transitional Justice and Representative Stevens, and I believe a couple of the other people on this committee had met with the presenter also to discuss the ins and outs of what truth and I call it accountability rather than reconciliation. What it means and how do we find this out? It's going to be a very complicated and I believe a very involved time-intensive project that we're all going to be working on. So this bill is really the beginning of what can make a big difference in you know impact on the people that were all the marginalized groups that were affected by the eugenics and in the case of the apanaki from first contact on. So I guess I have several questions but also comments about what this draft bill has or has not covered. My own feeling in discussing this with the Commission and with also the International Center for Justice is that each of the groups that were affected are historically different. The traumas, the truths, the experiences, and the length of time that we were affected are all different and this bill seems to just have one one group that will be overseeing everyone. So that's my first concern is how do we find the truth for each group? Each group has its own truth. Examples for the apanaki are that our land was taken with first contact was stolen. Our family units were broken up when children or adults were removed. We had language suppression, cultural suppression, and forced assimilation. So these are all experiences that I believe are kind of just involving apanaki. So I guess that's my recommendation is somehow there be a provision for having this umbrella group that's developed in in this bill and then having separate groups for each of the marginalized groups. And that when we were talking with the International Center for Transitional Justice, the apanaki, the commission came up with a title for our group, the Truth Gathering and Accountability Council. And of course, I'll answer questions if you have them with me afterward. But I also had questions regarding the first paragraph that in the draft that talks about both past and present, but later in the bill, it only talks about doing research on present or current status of historically disadvantaged. So it's if you don't do the research on the past, then how can you really make amends for the past? I also had a question about the recommendation for the makeup of the commission members where it talks about appointing a member from each of the four tribes in consultation with the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs. I believe that somebody actually from the commission should be appointed as well. Each of the tribes are the representatives would be representing their own respective group, whereas the commission has an overall view and it keeps in mind that everyone is affected in the indigenous community. So we don't advocate for a particular group, which is what the tribe members would be doing. So I guess I have one question of my reading in the bill is that is the time period that you're looking at only from eugenics on or would it actually in the case of the Apanaki include from first contact on? So those are my thoughts and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Carol. I think again from what I just heard and I want to just emphasize again as a draft proposal, this is the work that we're really entering into now on this bill. So I appreciate your comments. We've been trying to be very sensitive about each individual group's truths and how they're handled. And I certainly appreciate the comments about not wanting to get caught up, not feeling like you're going to get caught up in and perhaps left behind. And I think this applies to everybody who's going to testify today of just saying that we don't. We want to appreciate the fact that each group has a different truth or a different story or a different history that would need to be addressed individually here. Questions for Carol? We may broaden the conversation after we hear from the other witnesses. Thank you, Carol. Always good to have you as representing the commission here and in committee. Great. Thank you so much. Next up is Susan Aronoff, who is a senior planner and policy analyst for the Ramon Developmental Disabilities Council. Susan, you joined us last year on, testified on the apology. Welcome back. Great. Thank you. I wish I could see some of you in person sometime soon. For the record, my name is Susan Aronoff and I am a senior planner and policy analyst for the Ramon Developmental Disabilities Council. I haven't spent that much time with your committee, so I'd like to explain a little bit about the council and why I, an agency of human services employee, gets to come and talk to the legislature about issues that impact the lives of Ramoners with disabilities. And I get to do so free of any interference from and without needing the consent of any administration or state official. So that's really a luxury. I am very privileged and really grateful that I get to do this. I will say at the start, really the main thrust of my job is usually to bring the voice of people with disabilities directly to you. And I would really encourage this committee, as it did last year, to open the doors, open the table, open the conversation to the people with disabilities and their family members who were directly and are still directly impacted by the policies of the state. I'm an employee. I myself do have a history of disability, but I wasn't, I didn't live in Vermont. So anyway, I think you should really hear from Ramoners with disabilities who are directly impacted. That said, I want to go back to a little bit background about the disabilities council, which, like all developmental disabilities councils, we are a creature of federal law. We're entirely federally funded in exchange for receiving this federal funding. The state has designed a set of insurance assurances with what's called the agency, and this is key, on community living. The agency on community living is the agency, the federal agency that councils answer to. The agency and community living was created in the aftermath of the great expose Willowbrook. And it was created, DV councils were created as a federal response to the horrific conditions at Willowbrook. At a time when, you know, the people say the conscience of the nation was shocked. And for those of you who are too young or don't remember, I would encourage you to really Google, Google that. There are some amazing films and footage of Willowbrook and they are chilling. And the conditions in Willowbrook that were exposed led to the creation of the entire federal apparatus that today protects and advocates for and on behalf of people with disabilities. I happen to work in the developmental disability area, but there's a protection and advocacy system for people with mental illness. And our disability rights Vermont is Vermont's protection and advocacy legal arm. They subcontract some of that work with the legal aids disability law project. Anyway, we're all sisters. Agencies were like the three-legged stool we were all created together. It basically accomplished the same goal, which is to make sure that people with disabilities in this country have a voice, are seen, are protected. And then slowly, and through the years of advocacy and decisions by the United States Supreme Court, institution conditions improved and institutions themselves were closed. And there's a mandate that people, if they want to live in the community, can live in the community. And again, this is just really key because the state of play right now for people with disabilities in Vermont, being able to live in the community, I know you guys are the housing committee, I encourage you soon to take up the issue of housing for people with disabilities and maybe consider adding people with disabilities to your housing equity bills. Find out what the home ownership rate is for people with disabilities, but for people with disabilities who are eligible to receive services from the state right now, and that is a small subset, small. We know that there are at least 85 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities waiting to find a shared living provider, which your committee isn't familiar with that is basically adult foster care. And so these are 85 people who are really at risk of nursing home placement or other sort of institutional placement because their needs are great enough they'd be entitled to a shared living provider, but there just aren't any really available right now in Vermont. So anyway, back to me and the council and why we're here today. Councils have to be made up of the majority of people with intellectual developmental disabilities and their family members. There are other seats on councils for state officials, like from our agency of education and department of health. And there always has to be a seat for service provider. And interestingly, this is the only requirement like this that I'm aware of, maybe our sister mental health agencies have one, but one of our council members always has to have the lived experience of living in an institution. And it doesn't have to be an institution like Brandon, it could be a nursing home. But anyway, all councils in all 50 states and territories are always supposed to be informed by that lived experience. So councils like ours exist today to bring the voice of people with disabilities to the heart of their communities in Vermont. The federal law talks about where Vermonters live, work, learn and play and specifically where the policies that impact their lives are made. So you the legislature, you make the most policies that impact people's lives. And half the time it's my job to educate legislators about the programs and services that exist now and what could be better. And then half the time it's my job to educate the people with disabilities about, hey, what are the things that the legislature doing now that might be impacting. And so it was you, the legislators, who this specific committee led by your chair, who took on apologizing for the eugenics policies. And it was legislators before you who created them. And I'm going to use the language. We don't use this language in our meetings. If I did, I would have to give a trigger warning. And when we met with the house leadership before the summer apology event, we said, hey, if you read the apology proclamation the way it is, you might want to give a trigger warning because it uses language we do not use. We don't. I'm going here today because I think it's important that you hear this language again in case it's been forgotten that what Brandon was originally called. But when people were told to give their children up and leave them at Brandon and forget about them, that's the testimony that you heard from some of our council members. And when you heard from Susan Ashcroft, who lived at Brandon last year, those of you who are here. This is what Brandon was called. It was the Vermont State School for Feeble-Minded Children. And Waterbury, I think you heard from people who lived at Waterbury. I cut my teeth as an attorney in Waterbury. It was a chilling place. And that was called Vermont State Asylum for the Insane. So that's what legislators before you created. And that's what you guys reached down deep to apologize for. And before issuing that apology, you listened to the stories of the people that just mentioned, Susan Ashcroft, Kaye Stambler, other people. And you also listened, I think, to some of their hopes and dreams for a better Vermont. And I just want to say a little bit about what happened when you guys took up the eugenics apology. I know I've said this before, but I can't really explain enough. Because you guys took up the eugenics apology, I had to explain eugenics to people who had never heard the word, didn't know what the word meant, but who most assuredly would have been targeted to be removed from the gene pool. And so I would say eugenics. It comes from you, meaning good, like euphoria, and genics, meaning genes, like literally eugenics means good genes. And then there'd be the silence as people realized I was talking about them, or their children, or their sister. Our council members aren't just parents, we have a council member as a sister of someone with downsides. And my council members and I literally, we were as shocked as you and other members of the General Assembly when we learned about, and we had to learn about Vermont's role in developing and spreading eugenics. We didn't know. So people with disabilities aren't born knowing any more about disabilities than anyone else does, or the history. So anyway, last year, the council's platform included the apology, and this year our council's platform includes what are the next steps, because when people came in to testify for the apology the committee said, and the apology itself says they're going to be next steps, this summer at the event, you know, well at the house, I had an opportunity to talk to the chair, and he relayed this question to me to bring back to the disability community at large. What would truth be? What would reconciliation mean? And so a committee is formed and discussions have begun between, you know, Vermont, just so you don't, in case you're not aware, there's an umbrella organization called the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights, which is made up of a lot of member organizations from lots of different types of disabilities, like the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired and Green Mountain Self-Advocates. And anyway, we have an umbrella organization that has a policy committee that's now talking about this very thing. What would truth mean? What would reconciliation mean? And the main thing that people are coming up with is, geez, Brandon closed 25 years ago, and the promises of Vermont made then just have not been kept. As I said at the beginning, there are at least 85 people waiting, 85 with a small group of people who get Medicaid-funded home and community-based services. They're waiting for a simple place to live. Even if they had the places to live, we don't have a workforce right now to support people in the community. So our entire workforce, the home and community-based workforce, needs a living wage. And those wages need to go up annually, just like the wages for hospital workers do and insurance rates and everyone else in the continuum of care. The main thing that's come across to me is people want inclusion, inclusion in their communities. That was the big thing about eugenics, was it was a huge force of exclusion, taking people out of their communities, out of their schools, out of homes, separating people. So people want inclusion. And interestingly enough, there are people who want protection for parents with disabilities and people who want protection, who want positive sexuality education for students with disabilities. The theme of this year's Disability Awareness Day is built on this. It's inclusion everywhere. And the theme is open to change, open to all. And so I would encourage you as a committee, when you look at H96, to take that message to heart. Be open to change and to be open to all and to hear from other people and to consider practicing inclusion, not exclusion. Because the real takeaway in my message today is from the people who are impacted by eugenics. When I explain to them that H96 does not include people with disabilities, even though people with disabilities were very specifically included in eugenics, and in the apology, they're very confused. And so I try to say, well, maybe this isn't the eugenics next steps, maybe the committee's thinking of other steps for eugenics. So if so, it'd be great to hear. But if this is the next steps for eugenics, then I would say, take that message to be open to change and open to all, all at least who are in the apology. I got a message from one legislator that this might be intentional, and if you make the tent too big and include people with disabilities, the tent will collapse. So anyway, I was very saddened to hear that message from a legislator who I won't name, but who I respect greatly. And I just hope that this committee is thinking about excluding the disability community from your next steps. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. We have a question from Representative Pango and the trial. It's not really a question, but thank you. I just wanted to make a statement that I too was very confused when I read this bill because I was not part of putting this bill together. And to me, it doesn't even really entire, it does not entirely relate back to the eugenics apology that we worked so hard on. And I'm very confused at the conspicuous absence of some of the groups that we fought very hard to have included in the apology. So thank you for putting that all so eloquently, and I'm sure we'll have a lot of discussion about it. Representative Trina, thank you. Steven, yeah, sort of a follow-up. My thoughts, Susan, good to see you again. It's been a long time. And is that we not forget the disabled population that were impacted by eugenics? It really came clear in some of the reading and research that we did for the apology. And I think it's a very important thing to remember. And just a couple of comments, I lived on Staten Island when Willowbrook was closed and I was part of the opposition because it was just a total snippet. And I spent some time at the state hospital in Waterbury visiting clients there. And I can testify that that was not a very pleasant place to be either. So I can very much relate to the two instances that you bring up in your report. Thanks, Susan. Further questions for Susan at this time? Thank you, Susan. Next up, we have Dr, the Reverend Dr. Arnold Thomas, who is a pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Welcome back, Arnold. Thank you for having me. So good to be back. This committee is starting to look like an extended family. I've been my presence among you. We have a good handful of bills if you'd like to testify on them. I remember I keep reminding myself that I am a pastor of the church and so I know where my bread is buttered, but I appreciate the invitation. There are several thoughts I have in mind as I offer my support of this bill, of this bill, page 96. First, and it has been alluded to in the previous speakers, first is the thought that the work of this task force must ultimately merge with other groups that are seeking reparations for the harms and the oppressions done both within Vermont as well as in the nation. For instance, as H 387 addresses reparations for the institution and ongoing legacy of slavery against African Americans, the truth and reconciliation task force must inevitably incorporate the objectives of H 387 and other oppressed groups that are in need of reparations into its objective. Truth and reconciliation suggests a process of awakening and enlightening others about the repulsive and lingering realities of systemic racism and other forms of oppression toward BIPOC Vermonters that most Vermonters continue to either deny or of which they are unaware. If the purpose of this task force is to, and I quote, develop and submit to the General Assembly a proposal for legislation to create one or more truth and reconciliation commissions to examine and begin the process of dismantling institutional structural and systemic discrimination in Vermont both past and present, it already sounds like an intentionally crafted slow moving process of bureaucratic red taping that is bound to frustrate all involved. However, the element of this proposal that sustains my interest is the portion of the purpose statement that says examine and begin the process of dismantling institutional structural and systemic discrimination in Vermont both past and present, which means for me that this task force will not simply seek an apology for wrongs committed to BIPOC and other marginalized Vermonters, nor will it seek proactive inclusion into the present day power structures of the state. If we are concerned about dismantling institutional structural and systemic discrimination in Vermont, then the task force must address the critical examination and possible overhauling of an entire constitutional structure created to empower, preserve the economic, social, political, and moral status of white men over everyone else. In other words, we're not just asking for an equitable portion of the American pie. We're saying that the recipe is poison and needs to be recreated to satisfy the pallets of all invited to the banquet. If this is the intent of the task force, I'm all in. If not, then I would dare say you're wasting my time and that of every person of color and marginalized individual in this room. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Arnold. We are, is that a legacy hand? Yes. Sorry. So Carol and Susan and Arnold, thank you for your comments on this. I think we, as we've been moving forward since the, for several years now, since starting work on picking up work, really, not starting up, but picking up work on the apology and understanding in the context of, you know, really obviously contemporary events have shaped renewal of how we view the past. And what we have not to speak to Arnold's comments is to, we, as members of the system, and I always want to make sure that we all acknowledge that as legislators, no matter how much citizen legislators we are, we are part of the system that has created this, the circumstance. And so we take your words to heart. If we left, when we left people or names or situations out, it's not by commission and we will address this, the specific groups and the specific to the depth that you're advising us to as we, as we move forward. And we do not have experience in this and there is experience that we can pull on that will be available to us. Next week in particular, we'll be having a training with a group that the Vermont Commission has already worked with, Native American Affairs has already worked with to try to give us an understanding of what we talk about when we talk about truth and reconciliation. What do we talk, what are we talking about when we're talking about reparations? What are we talking about when we're talking about systemic, a dismantling systemic racism? What are we talking about when we address any of these needs and how can we make them worthwhile? Because to your point, Arnold, you're right. If this isn't true and deep then what are we doing? Okay. Susan? Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. One thing I didn't address, but I did just want to say because we have discussed it, preliminary discussions in what I will just call the disability community is the issue of reparations and restitution. I think this committee is probably aware that in other states people who were sterilized or family members of people who were sterilized have been receiving cash payments from states in response to eugenics policies. That's not something that's come up in any of the groups that I've been in. However, what I wanted to say is that for any sort of truth and reconciliation process going forward, I wouldn't suggest taking off the table and I'd be very interested in hearing how other states went about identifying who those people are today. Brandon closed 25 years ago. Some of you are probably aware, maybe you're not, that often as a condition of leaving Brandon, people had to quote unquote agree to be sterilized. So Brandon closed 25 years ago. It very well may be that there are people in Vermont alive and well today who were in fact sterilized at Brandon or any of the other places that performed sterilization. And I would not presume at all ever to speak on their family members behalf and take restitution of reparations for them as have been made in other states anywhere near off the table. Thank you. Thank you Susan. I am aware and will try to get testimony from individuals in California just had a recent settlement where this happened. So I want to introduce and invite Matt Dunlap to the table now. I have only met Matt last fall, like last fall via phone. Matt can introduce himself and how he fits into this picture. But it's the short story is that Maine with their with their federally recognized tribes had a truth and reconciliation commission a few years well and most recent one was a few years ago, which dealt with the use of funds for education and Matt served as a co-chair on that commission. And I wanted to invite him in because Matt was a part of Maine's system being involved in the legislature and in the government. And I just wanted to get has to have him share his thoughts just about not only the truth and reconciliation commission, but the notion of reparations. Because Arnold to your question earlier, I mean, again, nothing is nothing is finished. Nothing is done. But I certainly hear that the worry that if we put one one thing into motion a truth and reconciliation commission that the rest works on a linear matter that that so called reparations has to wait for something else to finish. I don't think I don't think personally I won't speak for the committee in the work that gets done by any potential committee. But the goal is to not make it linear because there are things that can be put into place, you know, otherwise. And I think I'll just turn it over to Matt to try to share his experiences in Maine with us. I hope plus and minus, you know, some of the roads that you had to that you had to travel to get to where you got to. So welcome, Matt. Before you start, we're going to introduce ourselves. I'm sorry, I didn't do this at the beginning. But if we can start, there's two of us on Zoom, Mary. Good morning. I am Mary Howard. I represent Rutland South District 53. Thank you. I missed my microphone. Sorry. So good morning, everyone, and welcome. My name is Chip Torielo. I'm representative representing Harvard Standard and Walden in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. And I missed that we have a third member online. Representative Byron. He may not be any representative Byron is online as well. Representative Hango. Good morning. I'm representative Lisa Hango, Franklin Five. I represent Richford Berkshire, Franklin and Highgate on the northern border of Vermont. I'm Seth Blumling, and I represent Burlington, Southland. John Kalaki from South Burlington. Joe Parsons, I represent the town of Groton, Topson, and Uber. John Goliath, I represent Milton. Tommy Walts, I represent Berry City, born in Bangalore, and grew up in Visi. Barbara Murphy, I serve Fairfax in the district of Franklin, too. And Tom Stevens, I live in Waterbury, represent Waterbury, Huntington, Bolton and Buellscore. Well, well, if you're ready for me, I am. Thank you, Representative Stevens and distinguished members of the General Housing, Military Affairs Committee. My name is Matt Dunlap, and I live in Old Town, Maine. A little bit about myself. I'm not too far from Visi. And in fact, the old Visi Railway used to run right through Old Town. It was the second railway in the United States. So we have a very strong affinity for Vermont. Our family goes out there every year, usually around Stowe and Burlington. So I seldom ask you all directly for permission to come and contribute to your economy. I do try to get some leave to come and visit from my good friend Jim Kondos. And prior to him also, Deb Markowitz, I was Secretary of State in Maine for 14 years. And I was State Auditor for a year. And I was in the legislature for eight years, representing the old 121st House District, which included part of Old Town and the Penobscot Nation. So I had the opportunity to meet with a concentrated group of legislators talking about this process in Vermont, and had a follow-up conversation with Representative Stevens about our experience. One of the things I am going to do for you, I just entered into the chat a link to the report of our commission, which since this is a public meeting, this will be part of the public record. It's, you know, let me just get right to the discussion here. Now it may shock the members of the committee to learn that this is a very emotional and draining process that you're about to engage in. This is something that, you know, we were the first State, actually the first commission of its kind in the world, to be created with the consent of all the parties involved. Now that sounds a little bit odd. We spent a lot of time studying what commissions of this kind do, and there have been a lot of truth commissions. So as a process I had never really heard very much about. You don't really hear much about truth commissions when you chair the joint standing committee on inland fisheries and wildlife for six years. The process itself has been employed in the recent decades to try to bring some closure, if you will, to periods of great upheaval, and typically there's an event, right? There's an insurrection or a rebellion, and there are atrocities committed. And when the smoke clears, one side typically will establish the victorious side, if you will, will establish a truth commission to get to the bottom of the crimes of those who have been defeated in said revolution. So in that regard, they're sometimes used as justification for putting people in prison, that type of thing. And we were looking at it in an entirely different way. Maine has four federally recognized tribes. At one time we had as many as 30 Native nations endemic to Maine, many of whom merged with others or fled to Canada or just simply evaporated. And like Vermont, I'm sure if you delve into the origin of many of your place names, many of those places are not just rivers or counties, they are actually names of now disappeared tribal communities, including the Andrew Scoggin, the Chasun Cook, the Soco, the Kennebec. Those are tribes that no longer exist officially in Maine. So our tribes are the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Malaseet, and Micmac. Some of the Micmacs and Malaseats have strong presences, mostly in Canada, but they also spill over into Maine. So the process that we went through was really almost accidental. The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978, Maine lagged in compliance. And there is an effort to try to improve compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act, which basically says that in a stressed tribal family, if children have to be removed and placed somewhere else, they should be placed with another tribal family and not a non-tribal community. So that Maine paid no attention to really. And the timeline was about 21 years before Maine really took a look at this. And there was an effort to try to train its health and human services caseworkers in this field. And a training video was created interviewing members of the tribes who had been taken away from their families. And it was a terribly traumatizing event. And that got people to thinking, and over the course of about 10 years, this process came before the idea of developing a truth commission to look at what had happened in the child welfare system in Maine from 1978 forward. Now, the mandate was rather loose, which is good because we took testimony from many, many people who fell outside of those parameters. And that's important as you're building a truth commission or giving it a mandate, give them the flexibility they need to do their work. The issue of reparations came up very soon. It was something actually, I was named to the commission in the fall. There was a whole process. And it was not created by the legislature. It was created by a convening group of about 25 people, which had representatives from the state as part of it. Many tribal folks, people from outside both circles. And then they came up with an agreement, an intent to do this. It was signed by the tribal chiefs and the governor officially in the state house. I believe if I can go back and look at that really quickly, that would have been in 2000. They wrote the mandate was written in 2010. And then in 2012, in June of 2012, they had a signing ceremony between the governor and the fourth tribal governor. That started a fairly lengthy process of selecting commissioners. There are five commissioners selected. I was one of them. And we had 25 months to go through this process. We had to develop. We had to hire staff. We had to raise money. And we went into the tribal communities. And our job effectively was to bear witness to what people had been through. And we learned a lot about the industrial schools, the residential schools, if you will, which have now come back into the news because of the mass graves found at some of them. But I'm going to get back to the reparation thing. I keep drifting away from that. And I apologize, Mr. Chairman. But after I was named, I had just been reelected after a two-year absence to Secretary of State again. I had done some work in the private sector between my two stents. And then one day I got a call from our governor. And the governor was, excuse me, quite concerned about my presence on the commission and said explicitly that if I was on the commission that he could not support the work of the commission. And that was because he said to me, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the people of the state of Maine. And someone could take a report of this commission and then warp it somehow to leverage financial reparations. Well, as it happened, I knew a thing or two about reparations because I had been Speaker Pro Tem in the Maine House. We had our own series of scandals. I know Maine doesn't seem like a scandal place. We do have our scandals from time to time. This one was a bad one. And it went on for many, many years. We had a school for the deaf located just outside of Portland, Maine. And the abuses that were wrought there were truly horrific, true atrocities rendered on helpless children. And the state basically turned a blind eye. And when it all came out years later, work was done by the legislature to try to atone for those sins. And as a result, they came up with a pool of money to compensate people for what they'd suffered. Now, what I said to the governor is that you go look back on the Baxter School for the Deaf Compensation Fund, there was no commission that recommended that. The legislature just did it. So in terms of policy, the legislature has the power to act on what Reverend Thomas and Ms. Aronoff have talked about, which is to try to make people whole. You don't need a commission to do that. And I mentioned this to Representative Stevens in our conversation. What the commission does is not justify trying to find a way to make things right financially for people. That's a separate track. It's a separate process. What we were interested in is finding a vector for people to find healing. This is something that's really, really important. For those folks who were traumatized by telling their stories about what had happened to them in the child welfare system, you have to remember that they didn't realize they had stories. This is just what they had experienced. It was their lives. They didn't see it as a one-off or an exception. And part of what we did in hearing and bearing witness to what they had to say was to assure them that no, they were not out of their minds. This was not normal. It was criminal what had happened to them. And you hear what people did to children. One of our witnesses talked about when they were taken by the state. This is done by the state, mind you. And the churches had some involvement as well historically. She was playing in her yard with her sister. And all of a sudden a station wagon pulls up and these people come out and they go into the house. Her mother was out picking berries in the back field and they grabbed trash bags. They put their clothes in the trash bags and they hustled them into the car. And what she talked about as they drove and they drove and they drove, she's looking out the window trying to remember landmarks. And she thought in fear and panic that I'm not going to remember my way home. And that's just one part of that horrible story. So we bear witness to these things. We have an archive, a video archive of the testimony that was taken not only from tribal members, mind you, but also people that were caseworkers at the time, judges who presided over some of these cases. We issued a report which is now on your committee website. And the work continues. And it didn't follow any predictable path, by the way. You know, we would make very complicated arrangements to go visit some of these communities up in Madatnikuk or in Zabayek or in Indian Township or outside of Caribou. We drive for many, many hours. We'd have hotels. We stay there for several days. We get into a community center and not a single person will show. And we would wait, you know, and then we'd leave. And of course, the convening group now called Wabanaki Reach, you know, they had set up a mechanism. This was a question that came up. You know, did you have someone standing by to sort of provide support to people? Yes, we did. But they would report back to us that after we left, people would sort of gather. And they'd have these talking circles and kind of like go over what they've been through. And that still continues. So in no small way, we were incredibly successful. Now, there is also another resource, which I had mentioned to the chair and to the group I spoke with earlier in December. And this happened rather early on. So here we are. This has never happened before. And we're trying to figure it out. So we, one of the folks from the convening group says, hey, we have this great opportunity. And they're like, okay, what's the opportunity? Well, there's a documentary film crew that like to follow you around. And I think all five of us, you know, all of our eyes rolled into the back of our heads. And I think there may have been flecks of foam at the corner of our mouths. I think this is going to be hard enough to do this. You know, having somebody having over you, the camera is just, that's kind of a non-starter. But the Upstander Project did follow us around for two years. They shot thousands of hours of film. And that was gelled into a documentary film. The original documentary is about 90 minutes long. They edited down to an hour. It was called Dawn Land. And you can find the trailer and maybe some of the facts of the film, aspects of the film on YouTube, Dawn Land, that was shown on Independent Lens and Public Broadcasting at Wonanemi Award. I tell my friends who are about to see it for the first time that they will be amazed that I did all my own stunts in the film. It turned out to be one of the most important things that came out of that process. It's been seen millions of times and has sort of served as a bit of a blueprint, if you will. We have learned not only of the TRC process as being contemplated in Vermont, but one of our commissioners, Sandy Whitehawk, is a Lakota Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota and lives in Minnesota. Apparently now Minnesota is engaging in the truth and reconciliation process along the same lines. So, you know, we did study a lot of truth commissions and they all had different goals. Some of them do not succeed. You know, they never get to the point where they write a report. So, how you craft this thing is really, really important. And it could very well be that the work of this committee is just the very, very beginning of this process as you establish and authorize a commission and then try to figure out how it's going to be constructed and what its aims are going to be. You know, the reparation component, which I know is on everybody's minds, sort of follows its own track organically and is not necessarily critical to the work of the commission. Understanding, I think, you know, and I'm going to stop after this point because I can go on for a long time about this, we understood early on that the most important audience, the most difficult audience that we had to talk to was not the tribal communities. It was our own community, the post-colonial white community. One of our key findings in our report was that much of what had happened to children, tribal children in our child welfare system, which was supposed to protect them, was a result of two major components, institutional racism and cultural genocide. That had a strong reaction from many corners. You talk to people in the street and they're like, genocide. I have nothing to do with that. It's very difficult for people to take ownership of their own culture and say with any type of emphasis that where I'm sitting right here in Old Town May. It's a lovely community. I was digging into the yard to plant a flower garden and I got into the clay, which is part of the ancient riverbed of the Penobscot River from the glacial melt. The Penobscot's have lived here for probably 12,000 years. I get to live on this little piece of land because someone who came in here long before me made sure that it was taken away from the Penobscot's so that my community could thrive here. You have to have some ownership of that and responsibility for it. If you can take responsibility for it, this is a thing I said over and over and over again as Secretary of State that I could not divorce myself from the actions of any of my predecessors, including colonial predecessors. If you own it, then you can change it. You can stop it and maybe make that long transition from occupier as my friend Giza Tonamook, who is another commissioner, said to neighbor. That's an important but difficult journey. With that, I'll stop, Mr. Chairman. At the pleasure of the chair, I'll entertain any questions of the committee at this time or later if it should come to pass. Thank you, Matt. Can you spend a little bit of time on the process prior to the formation of the commission? I mean, we may do things differently in Maine. I don't know if you do it by resolution or it has to go through statute like what we have to do. But can you just talk a little bit about the place where we are right now to the point of having a commission to start in? Yeah. Well, you're in light years ahead of where we were and still are in many ways. The legislature has never really taken control of this at all in Maine. There is pending legislation right now. The Maine situation is somewhat different from Vermont's in that because we have four federally recognized tribes. Going back 50 years ago, there was some serious federal litigation involved that the state of Maine had was in serious breach of a number of the treaties that had been either signed by the state or inherited from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part until 1820. And that because of those treaty violations, vast tracts of land that were held by either private interests or by the state itself were subject to forfeiture to the native communities. That litigation was resolved by a federal act that was signed by President Carter in 1980 called the Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, which was really rushed through and I think it was rushed through historically because there was fear that if President Reagan, after he took the oath of office that he would not have any inclination to sign such a bill. So people wanted to get this put to bed. Now, unfortunately, there was a disconnect and how people perceive that federal law. The tribal folks believe that we are beginning a conversation. State folks believe that the conversation was now ended. It was it was resolved, you know, that it had been settled. And a big chunk of what came out of that was that the tribes basically abandoned much of their sovereign interests in exchange for a large cash settlement from the federal government. So there's well over 500 recognized tribes in the United States. All of them have distinct levels of sovereignty in self governance, except for the tribes in Maine. And so now there is legislation to try to restore many aspects of tribal sovereignty. It's very difficult to move. This is a very complicated bill and it's scheduled for a second hearing later this month. The chairs of the committee are very skeptical of its chances because the governor has issues with it. So it's a really it's really a very difficult taffy poll. But to your to your point, Vermont's way ahead of us, you know, the legislature is actively involved in the legislature in Maine continues to grapple this. And in my conversations with Maine legislators, they say that, you know, I'm also currently the chair of the Episcopal Diocesan Committee on Indian Relations and the state of Maine, the bishop there asked me to be a part of that. And I am chair of it. And the chair, as I said, is really the work of groups like the Committee on Indian Relations and the Episcopal Diocese and the Quaker Friends Committee, which is very active in these affairs, that's really going to move the needle more so than the legislature itself. Because with all due respect to the legislature being a former member of a legislature, I know that the longest four letter word in the legislative language is in fact change. You know, everybody hates change, you know, because it's unpredictable and you don't know what path is going to take and where it's going to lead you. So in that regard, you know, what we did in Maine, and I can send you another link, which I will send you another link. And this is actually a very useful Wikipedia link, which tells you a little bit about what that timeline looked like, which is not in the report I also posted. So I'm sure Ron can put that on the committee page as well. So that tells you a little bit about the timeline that we went through and who the commissioners were and that sort of thing and how the process went forward. But it was sort of, like I say, it was organic, it was independent. It was the convening group, which, you know, came about just, like I say, organically, it was not a legislative thing at all. And while we have had legislation in front of the judiciary committee in the legislature, not a lot has moved. These are very, very difficult issues to get your hands on. Tell me a little bit about this independence, about however organically, because there's one of the issues that I constantly come back to is that as a legislator, as a member of this system, it's very, it's, we can't be the judge, the jury, and the defendant in if we stress that out to a truth and reconciliation commission. So where did, where was this independently housed? I mean, we've heard, you know, we don't have a ton of resources, but was this housed in, you know, school of law? Was this housed through the university? Was this raised, was the money raised totally independently from mayors who were just interested in seeing this form of conversation? It was, it wasn't really housed anywhere. You know, that was one of the strange things about it compared to what, you know, I've been on a lot of task force and commissions over the years. It was authorized by the five governments, you know, the Penobscot, the Passamaquoddy, McMack Malaseet, and the state. They got, you know, they signed a mandate that we were going to do this together. So, you know, the funding is actually a really important story, because originally we had had a promise of a substantial grant, grant from a national foundation that was going to pay for the whole thing, $2 million. And that fell through at the very last minute. Luckily, our co-chair, Carol Wishcamper, had had a long history in institutional fundraising. And in fact, all of us had some history in fundraising, including myself, most of my fundraising is accidental or political. So we knew how to raise money. And that's how we funded the commission was through grants from, you know, foundations and other nonprofits. And we were able to kind of do it on the cheap, if you will. I mean, we had to rent an office. We had a researcher. We had an executive director. We had an administrative assistant. And that was really, for the most part, about it. We had some other folks, but they were not paid. And then we had, you know, money to rent hotel rooms. It means a big state is bigger than the rest of New England combined, you know, not to brag or anything. But, you know, that's, you know, really, you go up to far northern Maine, like around, you know, Madawoska, Fort Kent, from the state capitol in Augusta, it takes less time to drive to New York City than it does to drive to Fort Kent. So, you know, we obviously needed to have hotel accommodations when we went into some of the communities. So we had money to pay for that type of thing. But also, too, we were all willing to kind of take care of ourselves, you know, so we didn't have to be reimbursed for mileage, you know, for example, that type of thing. So, you know, in that regard, we were able to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. The more independent you can make it, I don't know how the Vermont statutes work, but in Maine, we have a mechanism of the authority, if you will. The authority is a quasi-independent organization that does not answer to the executive or to the legislature. It exists on its own. And as a separate construct, like our Turnpike Authority, we used to have an Atlantic Salmon Authority. So that gives them a patina of independence, you know. But, you know, whatever mechanism you have, the more independent you can make it, the better off you are for the very reasons that you cite. You may want to create a mechanism that simply, you know, develops the commission, you know, comes up with criteria, an interview committee, you know. When Maine's commission was formed, you know, there was like almost 500 people that were interested in being a part of it. There's a woman that I went to church with that asked if she could nominate me. I guess I look like a light touch, I suppose. And I said, well, hold on, you know, because I represented the Penobscot, I've seen a lot of great ideas come out of Augusta, designed to save the native peoples. You know, sometimes they sort of take a step back and scratch the head. It's like, what is this all about? So I talked to some of the folks that I trusted in the Penobscot Nation. And they said, this is arguably one of the most important things we've ever done. And so I said, sure, go ahead, nominate me. I have no background in child welfare, they'll never pick me. It was so extraordinary that when I went from my interview, I couldn't believe I was invited for an interview. I said to the, to the interview committee, I said, it must be very lonely at the bottom of the barrel, if you're talking to me. All of us who were selected said the same thing when we first got together that we never thought we'd be picked. But they did a really good job. We worked really, really well together. We had two native people on the commission. Neither were Wabanaki. They were not from Maine. Gisetanamuk was Mashpee Wampanoag from Cape Cod, led to New Brunswick, and Sandy Whitehawk, as I mentioned, was a Lakota Sioux from originally from South Dakota. The others, you know, Gail Werbach was chair of the, of the social work department at the University of Maine. Carol Wishcamper had been on the state board of education, and I was secretary of state. So, you know, a very diverse group. One of the dangers that you will, that we were told about, about having a tribal member on the commission is, or even all the tribes represented, is that they would compete with each other for attention. You know, that was the fear that they, that the McMack representative would be focused on the McMack issue, and the Penobscot representative would be focused on the Penobscot issue, and that get every, all the tribal members out of there. That was controversial. In fact, I had a malice tribal representative in the legislature come up to me and say, I should resign so he could take my place. There was no mechanism to replace us if one of us passed away, which thankfully nobody did. We just continue on with four commissioners instead of five. So, you know, I don't know a lot of it was by, if, how much of it was by design, Mr. Chairman, but it seemed to work pretty well. The independence component of it, you know, you know, we have the report out there. Like I said earlier, I think the most important aspect of it was the documentary, which I invite, I send a link, I believe, to to the chair and some other folks who were interested in this from the upstander group. It's not something you just download. It's right now, there's still, you know, proprietors of it. They show it for free. And it's out there, so I can help facilitate that if the committee is interested. Representative Hango. Thank you very much for being here. I am kind of blown away to use that term widely. No, I just can't believe how different the organization you have in the state of Maine is from what we have here in Vermont. And I do find it extremely refreshing to know that it was an independent commission that worked on this. And they were not, you were not folks who were politically connected at that time. So this is all very fascinating to me. And I really appreciate the chair bringing you in. Thank you. Well, and I have told the chair and others, you know, I'm happy to be at your disposal. I mean, I can talk with you individually if you want to get some more, some more detail. Again, this is a long story and I've tried to keep it kind of short. Just to be courteous to you as the committee and the public. But it's, it is a different construct than what I was used to being a part of. You know, an example to look at is look at the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is sort of fashioned in a similar way to what you're describing, which was a government mandate. The government funded it with hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's, it's, I think it's actually still going on. It's a, this is a really, really hard process. And I don't think there's any formula that works better than another. It really depends on what you want it to do and what you think will work for the people of Vermont and the members of the Abenaki people who were endemic to that area, which is really what you want to focus on. So yeah, really it's up to you how you want to proceed. Thank you. Representative Lumley Abenaki. Yes, hi, Matt. Thanks so much for this presentation. Very, very helpful. I am curious about what the government's role was. You say it was, you know, as independent as it could be, but was there legislative action or was there executive action that, you know, empowered this process to begin? And can you tell us a little bit more about who was choosing those who would serve on the commission? Sure. So the, the, the group that was put together to interview potential commissioners really emerged out of what became known as the convening group and now Wabanaki Reach. They, you know, and state government was represented there. There were representatives of the governor's office and the attorney general's office that were a part of it. You had folks from the department of human services. You had folks from the tribal communities. I could probably get a comprehensive list, if you're interested in who those people were, maybe talk to them, you know, about what they were thinking as they put together the commission. It was totally independent, you know, to the point where when Governor LePage said, I want you off this commission, I talked to the other commissioners. I said, if you think this is going to cripple our work, I'll resign and they're like, no, we want you to stay. So we were like, okay, Governor, see you. The ship sailed. There's nothing you can do about it. You know, and that's one of the things I think when you think about independence, you know, you deal with this every day as legislators, the independence of the House versus the Senate from the executive, from the courts, even as individual members, you know, the authority of the chair comes from the committee. If the chair makes a ruling and members of the committee disagree with it, they can move to overrule the ruling of the chair. So independence is really sort of the watchword of what we do in government. So it wasn't completely alien and unfamiliar. In terms of what the legislature itself, most of them were completely unaware of what we were doing. And there was legislation that was filed to put some of what we talked about into statute. Some of that happened on a minor key. But how do you put cultural genocide in the law, right? You know, it's very difficult. I think the simple recognition, and this is, again, a really important thing about the outcome was cut to the chase. So we finished our report, and now we're about to issue it. Well, what do you do? You know, the first thing we did was we went to every individual tribal community and let them see it first before we made it public. The reaction was really stunning. You know, it wasn't, you know, nobody, you know, pumped their fist in the air. You could see their shoulders kind of drop with relief. You know, it's like, oh, you know, what we see is true. You know, this is, you know, we're not just, you know, suffering in silence. Other people see that we have suffered a loss as well. You know, so it was, I guess, the reaction was one of relief that, you know, what they experienced was a real injury, a real harm. You know, have we gotten to the point of forgiveness? No, no. I think there's, you know, there's, you have to ask for forgiveness before you can really receive it. That hasn't happened. It's a long process, and it continues to go on, and it will for some time. I mean, let's be clear, ladies and gentlemen, you know, we're talking about 500 years of genocide and oppression. One committee cannot wipe that out, and it's going to take a, you know, but you can start that process. And Sandy Whitehawk was very fond of saying that, you know, the elders had always said that when this process begins, it begins in the East. And that was the prophecy. And she was always very hopeful about Maine's process. And I think is now, you know, continue to say that as what you're discussing is now taking a firmer root in the cultural mindset, the cultural discourse. Very important stuff. Matt, can I have one? Oh, Representative Clark, you had a question. Well, I'm good at losing. It's very similar to what I've asked. So thank you. So, Matt, I'm going to ask you to share one of the things that you mentioned early on, and we experienced this certainly over the last couple of years while working on the apology and listening to testimony from effective groups from the eugenics survey. And but when we, when we talked in December, you mentioned, I want to talk about the personal weight that you felt as when you took this on, because you told me an anecdote about your daughter seeing the film. Yeah, it was an incredible commitment. You know, one of the reasons, you know, one of the things they asked me in my interview, you know, because I was running for Secretary of State, and they said, do you think being Secretary of State offers a conflict? And I said, you know, the Secretary of State of Maine is somewhat different from the Secretary of State in Vermont. You know, yes, we oversee elections. But I oversaw the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the State Archive, the corporate filing offices. And I said, well, I don't think a UCC filing has much impact on child welfare. So I, you know, I don't see a conflict professionally. And also too, as you know, the agency head, that was what was going to give me the scheduling flexibility to allow myself to do this. I was master of my own calendar, as it were, but it did take a lot of time. So about my daughter, who's now a junior at the University of Maine, she was, you know, in middle school at the time. This, we started this in 2012. So this is now 10 years ago. So the film comes out. And it was being shown first in film festivals, won every Gold Palm Award you can imagine. And then it was on independent lens. And it was had over a million and a half viewers across the country. It won an Emmy award. And so finally they have a showing of Don Land at the University of Maine, right near by us, right between Old Town and VZ, as it were. And so I take my wife and daughter to go see a screening of the full film, hour and a half long. And because I was there, you know, I take questions from the audience, much like I'm doing now. So we're heading home and my daughter says, Oh my God, I had no idea what you were doing. What did you think I was doing for two and a half years? She said, I thought you were doing research. Never, you know, research going away for three or four days at a time. She's here. She was living in my house. Of course, you know, she was a busy teenager, you know, and but you extrapolate that out into the community. A lot of people did not know what we were doing or what we were hearing. And, you know, as I mentioned, you know, that first, you know, the very first community visit. And I think I told the chair this story and it's something I carry with me. We had this, you know, this is long, this is something that happened long before the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act. And you had this woman who had been placed in a foster home here in Old Town. Old Town, I always thought, was a pretty friendly community. And she was there with her sister and the foster parents didn't like Indians and called them dirty little Indians. And if they had an infraction of the house rules, one of the, there are a couple of different punishments, different severity, one of the punishments was that you would not be allowed to eat for a day, got no food. So, you know, here's this kid, you know, hungry, runs into the kitchen and steals a banana, takes it upstairs. Well, you know, the foster mother had counted the bananas, of course, you know, and found that one was missing. And she talked about how she heard this woman thundering up the stairs. And in a moment of panic, she takes the peel and shoves it under her sister's mattress. And so the foster mother comes in and what she do, she starts flipping the mattresses, finds the peel under the sister's mattress and the sister is locked in the basement for two days with no lights and no blanket. And I thought they're thinking, you know, who does this to small children? These are little kids, like six, seven, eight years old. And, you know, and that was the moment that I realized that there was no way I could absolve myself from any of this, you know, this was done in my name, it was done on my behalf as a white man, you know, regardless of my own intentions, my own history, this was done in my name. And that's a tough thing to confront. And I think that you have to be prepared for that. One of the things that, you know, we hear, especially in this very important time that we're in around social justice is, you know, between discussions of truth and reconciliation, reparations, you know, equality, we have to be careful as a white community to not find ways to absolve ourselves, you know, reparations don't make it go away. Yeah, that's, you cannot erase the past. As Lincoln said, we cannot escape history. And I think that, you know, trying to transform relationships, which is harder to do than to find ways to absolve oneself. You absolve oneself, you change the law, you know. If this was easy, the 13th Amendment would have made many of our racial issues go away. But it didn't. You know, we still confront issues of race. And these are things that are learned. They can be unlearned. We can look at the world in a different way. But it takes work. And it's hard, hard work. And that's one of the things I learned in high reliefs, and that of the main one of his child welfare truth and reconciliation mission. Thank you, Matt. Arnold. Good. Thank you, Mr. Dunlap for your presentation. I'm wondering what kind of spin-offs have resulted from the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in Maine. Well, I mentioned Wabanaki Reach, which is a direct outgrowth of the work of the commission. That was originally the convening group. And they continue to work in the tribal communities to foster talking circles and healing. And that's something that really isn't. And remember, this is not a matter of tribal communities and non-tribal communities. There are divisions within tribal communities. There are folks in the tribal communities who are very opposed to the formation of the TRC. It's like, why do you want to dig all this up again? Why do you want to rip those scabs off and start the bleeding again? You have people in the tribal communities who are very devoutly religious, very sensitive to the exposure of some of the participation in this historic injustices by, for instance, the Catholic Church. But it's there. And it's embedded in the culture. And you learn more and more and more about it. So we had the ice storm in 1998, which was as devastating in Maine as it probably was in Vermont. The National Guard was going around to communities with boxes full of blankets. Tribal communities absolutely categorically rejected the blankets. Because historically, that's how we spread smallpox to wipe out Indian people. And that's part of their cultural narrative, which we never thought of. That was a couple hundred years ago. So that was something that we continue to learn about. We had somebody in the commission thought it'd be a good idea to have someone who serve as our commission chaplain. And a woman came from the seminary to kind of sit with us and the folks from the tribal communities were horrified, absolutely rejected it because of the participation in some of these, especially removing children to the residential schools or the allegations that pedophilia priests could be relocated intentionally to tribal communities to get them out of the way. That was so far beyond our scope to talk about as a commission, but it filtered in. It was part of the testimony that was brought to us. So in terms of what the legacy of the commission is, is that it continues these conversations at sometimes a very intimate local level, not necessarily in terms of dramatic policy change, but as you know, dramatic policy change often starts with a conversation at the lunch counter. And I think that that's very much what has continued. And what's happening right now, for example, with LD 1626, the Tribal Sovereignty Bill, there's a lot of hand wringing that this bill may be dead on arrival, that it won't get through the committee or it'll be amended substantially. And I told the folks on the committee on ending relations that 25 years ago, the consideration of this bill would have been absolutely unthinkable. It would never would have gotten at a committee. You know, we wouldn't even be talking about it getting at a committee. But now, you know, the evolution carries forward. And you can see that in a lot of different policy areas, how that evolution takes place. And I think there's a lot of reason to be hopeful. Well, the reason I asked the question is because considering the extent of time and effort and detail that was placed in the TRC, as it relates to native native main tribes, I could also see the desire and need for other marginalized and oppressed communities within Maine, seeking a similar kind of format by which they can address issues of oppression and the history of oppression as it relates to those groups. Do you see that developing? Do you see the initiative that the TRC as it related to native tribes in Maine, spinning off into other groups that seek similar kinds of efforts? I think it's entirely possible. You know, certainly the Acadian people, you know, the Franco-Americans who were expelled from the St. John Valley, who became the Cajuns, Louisiana. You know, we used to hear stories about children being beaten by teachers for getting caught speaking French. You know, there's a lot of opportunity for that sort of thing, but it hasn't like opened a floodgate. You know, there are not moves to have other truth commissions. And I think honestly, Reverend Thomas, it's because it's a very difficult process. It's a difficult process to initiate. It's an difficult process to engage in. And in terms of the concrete results, it's difficult to see. You know, here we are now probably five years removed, seven years actually, seven years removed from the issuance of our report. And you know, can I point to concrete steps that have been taken? Few, few, but the dynamic conversation has changed. And that's, you know, that's the forerunner for it. So it's not like, you know, you introduce legislation to reduce the income tax and if fines can sense this and you've reduced the income tax and you can say, there, we saved everybody X number of dollars per year. It's not quite that product oriented. It's more of a cultural change that takes a long time to shift and embrace on both ends. All right. Thank you, everybody. We have to end this conversation right now. This is very thank you. I don't even want to put a magic to it. Thank you, Matt, for filling us in. And we'll be sure to keep you in our Rolodex to age myself there. And we will pick this conversation up soon. Before we go off, Steve, Ellis is here for the next bill. Steve, do you mind waiting for about 10 minutes? Do you have time? Not a bit. I have put my, I put my email in the chat, both my personal and my public email for anybody who wants to reach out to me after this meeting, Mr. Chairman. And Ronald had that I did share the, I did share the main report and I think it's going to get posted. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Carol. Thank you, Arnold. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate your time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, committee. And I look forward, if you want any folks with lived experience to come before your committee, let me know. I can line them up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Carol. Thank you. Sorry, committee. Nice.