 Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to acknowledge that we're on the unceded territory of the Maki people, and I'm very grateful to be meeting with all of you here today. And I'd like to thank the elder and the drummers that started us off this morning, and the organizers for putting this wonderful conference together. And particularly, Jen, Jennifer Llewellyn, for such a particular woman. She has a towering intellect and a rock-solid integrity and amazing ability to be a model for feminist mentors and for teachers. And I think we don't have quite enough of that going on in the world, and more Jennifer, please. So I just want to say that visitors to Canada might not be aware that we're waiting any day now to have the announcement of an inquiry, the establishment of an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. And this inquiry has been a long time in coming, and I just want to talk a bit about how it came about and how it illustrates the political and social context of Canada as a deeply racist and deeply racist culture that calls upon non-Indigenous pagans to educate ourselves and to address what unceded to be a horror environments. In 2002, I was an official observer of a truth commission in West Africa, and it prompted me to wonder why it is that Western democracies are so insistent that African nations must have truth commissions to address mass human rights abuses, while never folding one here. We never seem to want to have these processes at home, and we have mass human rights abuses galore. So I came back to Canada and worked as a lawyer again, but then I decided to go and do some graduate work on truth commissions. And I worked on truth commissions in established democracies because this sense of hypocrisy that I felt whenever I worked overseas was really bothering me. Canada's truth commission has wrapped up as of last year. We looked into the legacy of the residential schools in Canada over 100 years of stealing Indigenous children from their homes and their communities and forcing them to assimilate and lose their culture and their language and their heritage. And the call to actions that were issued by the Truth and the Consolation Commission last year, which I commend all of you to read, they're easily available at TIC.ca, and they don't all require government action. They require all of us to take responsibility for the implementation of them ourselves. And call to action 41 is a call for an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. But it's important to understand why that inquiry came about. For many years, Indigenous women's organizations have been telling us there is a problem here. Our women are being murdered and they are disappearing. And Indigenous women do experience violence at many times the rate of non-Indigenous women in this country. The homicide rate is six or seven times higher for Indigenous women than for non-Indigenous women. And it hasn't declined over the years, whereas the homicide rate for non-Indigenous women has been declining for the last more than three decades. So until recently though, the official numbers of these murders and disappearances were not being capped. Police didn't collect the information on Indigenous victims and it didn't include the number of missing women. And some police forces, the main one in Canada being Malone Canyon Mountain Police, ICMP, simply didn't collect the information. So police also weren't investigating when families came and said our loved one is missing and crime weren't prosecuting. So even if they hadn't been known, I think we all know that the convictions for any of those perpetrators were not actually beginning up in the causes. And so the non-governmental organizations in the country, especially Indigenous women, started to collect the information on these women and creating a database. The Native Women's Association of Canada started a sisters in spirit project which created a database of almost 600 cases by 2010. And many civil society organizations like the one that I work for, we've started to call for a national inquiry. And in 2014, an RCMP report actually found the numbers were almost double what everyone had found. So almost 1,200 women missing and murdered. But our government at the time refused to see it as anything more than an individual criminal issue. It's not a sociological problem, I think, Mr. said. And the Minister for the Status of Women at around table last year said it's largely a problem of domestic violence perpetrated by Indigenous men. So it's true that Indigenous women are killed by their spouses just like non-Indigenous women are. But the stats also show that Indigenous women are almost three times more likely to be killed by a stranger than a non-Indigenous woman. So Indigenous women started turning to international bodies to get some help on this issue. And the Inter-American Court on Human Rights and the Committee on the Elimination for the Discrimination Against Women Convention, both reported that Canada has committed grave violations of our international human rights obligations. And yet the past government said, you know, this has been studied plenty. We don't need another report. Why would we have an inquiry? So we put together a member of the Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence Against Indigenous Women, that wonderful woman, a leader here in Nova Scotia, Chell Maloney, started after the death of a Hinnok student, a grad student here. The coalition said, look, let's review all these reports that the government's relying on to say that there's no problem. And we reviewed 58 reports for background table last year and determined that there were 700 recommendations about how to address missing and murdered Indigenous women, root causes, and so on. And almost zero implementation. So we said, look, we do need an inquiry. And my belief is that an inquiry is necessary to examine that resistance, to implementing known and recommended measures to address violence against Indigenous women. And we need to shift the narrative in this country. We need to shift the narrative of how non-Indigenous Canadians like to think of ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as the good guys, the human rights defenders. And we don't want to look at those ugly truths of racism and sexism that are reflected by the terrifying decalice way that Indigenous women's lives have been devalued. So I think that a properly run inquiry can actually help us reshape our national narrative into one that is more honest and less self-serving. And the purpose of an inquiry is not just to write a report and make recommendations, its purpose is to be a catalyst for change. And this can happen if the inquiry is set up in such a way that it takes on a pedagogical role so that it can teach us in its very process as it goes forward how it is that Indigenous women are subjected to violence at a far higher rate than non-Indigenous women. And yet we do so little about it. So we need to ask these hard questions about the resistance of our society to honestly facing these systemic issues. And a well-run inquiry could stimulate that national conversation about the underlying causes that we can't afford to do more anymore. So an effective inquiry, I think, has to have two institutional design factors. Okay. Leadership and process are key. So an effective inquiry must be led by someone with integrity and vision and courage and compassion and fair-mindedness and commitment to independence and openness and transparency and the person must be respected and command the attention of the broader community and not just a subset of it to ensure the inquiry can fulfill its pedagogical potential. And that might be kind of obvious, but it really can't be understated. And of course my belief is that this inquiry must be led by an Indigenous woman and designed by an Indigenous woman. And an inquiry must also have a process that lends strength to that work and engages the broader community and creates knowledge and understanding through its very operations. So the result needed from the inquiry is being achieved well before the report is even written or the recommendations made. And I would expect that this group would be quite understanding with respect to how important the process is to achieve a just outcome. And there are ways to conduct an inquiry process that will enable people to feel that they're being heard and that will benefit the listeners. A section process will be effective with a clear media strategy that engages the public. They would hold public hearings that aren't lawyer driven and as a lawyer I can say it's important to not have lawyer driven hearings. Try to conduct them and witnesses first languages go to the communities, have different types of hearings and institutional hearings, community hearings, expert hearings and provide opportunities for civil society engagement and welcome independent research and make it clear that all the evidence that's heard will be valued. And of course I've supported this call for a national inquiry but I'm well aware of how easily such things can go off the rails and become wasteful and frustrating and miss its opportunities. And that's why it's critical that the government appoint the right people to do the job to lead the commission and shape the terms of reference in a way that will enable a meaningful inquiry to proceed. And of course all of this again must be done in consultation with indigenous women and their families. And I just want to keep in mind in the context of the last few years in Canada, we had an official apology in 2008 in Parliament for the residential schools and last year we had the call to action from the TRC but there's still this massive disconnect between our words and our actions here. The reality for indigenous people in Canada is not at all what it should be. We've had during that period of 2008 to 2015, the closure of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation of the National Association, sorry, National Aboriginal Health Office, the National Center for First Nation Governments, all these were defunded by our previous government. There were cuts to Sisters in Spirit Program that the Native Women's Association of Canada ran. The money got transferred to the ICMP by the way. In that period we had 151% increase in the number of federally incarcerated indigenous women, so 3% of the population, 32% of the federal prison population. That apology that the Ontario Premier gave for the Ontario Role in the residential schools a few weeks ago was, she was apologizing in the legislature as she should, but at the same hour we had a report released by on the ongoing effects of mercury poisoning in the grassy hours of First Nation. So this is structural violence, right? And it's an inquiry that needs to make a connection between the systemic issues of colonialism, including the residential school agency that led to the missing and murdered women. If the reconciliation narrative is to have any chance of overcoming the difference that we have to this violence we have in our society. We know in this country that there are well over 1,100 missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. What we need to know is that they are missing and murdered because they are indigenous women and girls. And I believe as non-indigenous members of the society we have an obligation to educate ourselves on the work to be done and commit to supporting the work that must come and to name and understand and challenge violence against indigenous women and girls and connect these dots, be willing to face the uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our society if we're to be serious about reconciliation. So we need to face the reality of deeply entrenched racism and sexism in our society. And think of how we treat indigenous women but also think about the structural matters, the governance, the treaty implementation, the education, the implementation of recommendations from the treaty commission. We can't just keep ignoring our own complicity here. And I just wanna say that finally we can't forget that this inquiry arises from the loss of well over 1,000 women, each of whom should be honored as a human being with a family and a life and the right to live without violence. And if we're to be a country that we wanna think of ourselves as, then we need to do this work. Thank you.