 Thank you. It's really my great pleasure and privilege to introduce and welcome to the stage Natan Obed. Natan Obed is president of Inuit Taperit Kanatami, the national representational organization for Canada's 60,000 Inuit. He's originally from Nain, the northernmost community in Labrador's Nunatiavut region, and now lives in Ottawa. For 10 years, he lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and worked as the director of social and cultural development for Nunavut Tungavik, the organization that represents the rights of Nunavut Inuit. He has devoted his career to working with Inuit representational organizations to improve the well-being of Inuit in Canada. So please help me welcome Natan Obed. Thank you so much for that introduction. I'm very pleased to be here today and also want to give a thanks to Katherine Graham for the invitation to come and speak today. I still am quite new to lecturing, especially in a university setting and it always brings me back to the first time that I went to a lecture and actually was influenced by the person who provided a perspective that I had not considered before and this was when I was at Tufts University in Boston and it was amazing a number of schools in the Boston area. I was able to go to a lecture by Chinua Echebi, who is an African writer and he was talking about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and had given his critique as an indigenous African to a colonial book which had a massive influence on the way in which the world saw Africa and some of the challenges within it. And then in my course of study, I had talked to land claim leaders, talked to people across Inuit Nunangat in Canada about the settled land claim agreements and then the effect that an agreement might have on Labrador, Inuit. That was the basis of my senior honours thesis in university because the Nazi reclaim had not been settled. And I kept going back to that speech and that understanding of colonialism and then post-colonialism in Africa and how some of the same things that happened in Africa actually have happened in the Canadian Arctic and we see the huge differences in first world and third world when it comes to where we think of Canada in the world. But the treatment of indigenous people, the post-colonial challenges that come about from a society moving away from its colonial origins, has just as many twists and turns and challenges here in North America and in Canada as it might have had in Africa. We still live in a time where it is really important to stop, stand back a second and reconsider where we are in our relationship, but also the types of things that we're doing and be very clear about the path that we all want to take and whether or not the acts of reconciliation that we are hearing about in the news or that we celebrate in doing in institutions like Carleton actually are meeting those end goals. So today I wanted to start with an understanding of Inuit democracy and I don't assume that even if you have worked with Inuit, you have a full appreciation understanding of Inuit democracy because it's complicated in many of our own Inuit and communities. I don't necessarily know how these structures all interact and work together because they are relatively new. I'll start with Inuit Taprikanatami. I am the president of our national organization and I wanted to start with our logo. It's something that is quite beautiful just in its own right, but it tells a story that then gets us into the nuts and bolts of how our Inuit democracy fits together. First you see that there are two women and two men based on the type of clothing that the four Inuit are wearing. An amauti is a woman's parka and the long hood in the back is a baby carrier as well as just a really cool piece of clothing. And then men have more simple silipox, so you have two men as well. So there's the equality between men and women. In the negative space in the middle, you'll see a Canadian flag and that is meant to symbolize our connection with Canada. The late Josie Kusugak, who was a mentor to me, coined the phrase, Inuit are first Canadians and Canadians first. We don't have a lot of the the same angst around our place within Canada, within our society, as perhaps First Nations communities do or Métis. It isn't to say there aren't Inuit who want to see a different relationship or are quite bitter about the relationship between Inuit and Canada, but it is to say that the way in which we have mobilized politically has imagined that we are Canadians and deserve services that all Canadians receive and share the same hopes and dreams as a country that Canadians do. It's amazing the passion that you see for things like the Olympics or other national events within Inuit communities who celebrate right along with all other Canadians. Below the Maple Leaf, you'll also see an Ulu in the negative space and that also is one of the key symbols and identifications of Inuit society. Our name, Inuit Tapri Kanatimi, is very decidedly Inukdut and that is the term that we use to describe the entirety of our dialects of the Inuit language and it means Inuit are united in Canada and the last part there, Kanatimi, is just Kanata in the Inukduticization of Canada and me is in and the middle word Tapali means United working together. Prior to 2001, our title of organization was the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada and it imagined that Inuit would be united in Canada. So as our land claim to resettled and as we solidified our democracy, we actually changed the name of our national organization to understand the point in time where we were. So this gets us into a conversation about Inuit democracy and I try to use this term because in the conversation on indigenous rights and on the organizations that represent indigenous peoples or the organizations that advocate on behalf of certain indigenous issues, there is a lack of appreciation and understanding about the underpinnings of democracy within those structures and there's a broad acceptance by federal provincial, territorial leaders, but then also the Canadian community that we are all just a random assortment of basically NGOs or groups that have special interests or special rights but are not necessarily organized in a way that you might think about municipalities, provinces or territories or federal structures. I want to impress upon you that there is an Inuit democracy and that in this time in Canada we don't really have to talk anymore about whether or not indigenous rights exist or the right to self-determination for indigenous peoples exists. Hopefully we have moved past that conversation. If we've moved past that conversation, we certainly haven't made any considerations for what that acceptance means for our democratic institutions. And often I have been in situations where I've had to explain why Inuit Depri Kanatemi has had certain positions at first ministers meetings or at federal, provincial, territorial, indigenous meetings or at council of federation meetings, all of these structures that are intergovernmental in Canada that try to bring together Canadian leadership in the Confederacy but systematically exclude those who represent indigenous people. And I say systematically exclude meaning that there is no consideration that there are rights of indigenous people that do affect confederation and that if you are going to have a conversation amongst the leaders of this country that the representatives of Inuit, First Nations and Métis are a part of that confederation and a part of that conversation because if you don't agree with that then you don't agree that self-determination exists. You don't agree that we have the right to our own governments or our own democracies. The frightening thing about that to provinces, to territories of the federal government is that the things that were decided on our behalf are now things that we have to do together and the wholesale change of expectation and participation of indigenous peoples to bring into reality indigenous rights takes away some of the inherent power that people feel that they have when they ascend to office as a governing party in a provincial, territorial or federal government. The imagination that you have complete control as a prime minister or as a premier and that within your cabinet table you can make decisions on behalf of all of your population and tough luck those outside of power are going to have to live with those considerations is you know the defining feature of party politics. Indigenous peoples and the way that we fit into those structures demands a renewal of that conversation. It doesn't demand necessarily new treaties with Inuit, it just demands that we change the way that we think about it. So if we're thinking about this new space we need to understand how our democracy exists. We have to tell you about this, we have to change this narrative. So it starts with all Inuit, wherever Inuit may reside in this country and it starts with our four constitutionally protected land claim agreements. In each one of our land claim agreements there are eligibility provisions and those eligibility provisions were negotiated between the government of Canada and the particular Inuit population that negotiated those land claim agreements. They are very different than Indian Act provisions around eligibility under the Indian Act. We are very lucky that our population does not fit under the Indian Act. We are not governed in any way by the Indian Act although we were influenced by the Indian Act by our exclusion from it and the exclusion from the fiscal policy space that flows from the imagination of how you fund Indigenous peoples issues in this country. That I'll get to a bit later. So we'll get back to all Inuit that are enrolled under land claim agreements. No matter where you are, if you're an inoken and over the voting age of your particular agreement, you can vote for your president and this isn't something that only if you live on within our settlement regions in Inuit Nunangat but all Inuit are able to vote for their presidents. These four presidents then comprise the board of directors for Inuit Tapirit Kanatimi and I am elected from every third AG annual general meeting of this organization and I am elected not on my own platform but to implement and deliver the platform of those four leaders. So we can say that we have a national democracy because we the direction that I receive for the work that ITK is to do is directly linked with the will of the people and who they choose to represent them in each of the four land claim regions. We do have components that are a little bit different within this structure. In Nunavut there are three regional Inuit associations. The Kitamuit Inuit Association, the Kebalik Inuit Association and the Kikitani Inuit Association and Nunavutungovic is its board of directors have two representatives from each of those organizations on its board. Also on our board at ITK we have the Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada which is our international arm. We have the National Inuit Youth Council and Pakhtutit Inuit Women of Canada. They are permanent participants on our on our board but are not voting members and the reason for that and the reason why I am not a voting member as well is because of that democratic institutional function. The idea that our democracy is intact from the community to the national and international levels and therefore ITK has the legitimacy to represent Inuit at the national level on the issues that the ITK board has entrusted us to do. This is a very important concept because we always get the immediate pushback from whenever there are any contentious issues from the Canadian public or from governments saying well, ITK might say this but I've talked to another Inuk in this community and they're fine with this policy area. So how do you describe that? The other and it's really a funny thing because I live in Ontario, I just voted yesterday. I know that not all Ontarians or whatever you call yourselves agree on policy areas or on any given issue whether it's carbon tax or education or any of the major policy issues. There are large splits but there's a democratic societal function and whoever wins the right to lead is then not questioned by people in this province and at a national level you wouldn't have a federal minister talk to the Premier of Ontario and then say well, I heard from this person who lives in Ontario that there's a completely different side to this and so who really is right? But that's what happens to Inuit. That's what happens to Inuit democratic functions when I sit in rooms when a minister has heard from an individual a different policy slant on the one that the position that I'm raising and I always say to the world that yes, in any society there are all sorts of different voices that make up that society in different positions and if I am not representing the interests of Inuit in the way that Inuit think is respectful then I won't be voted back in. I will lose my privilege to represent Inuit in this country and the same goes for all of the levels within this democratic structure but for the time being whether a minister likes it or not the positions of ITK are the positions of ITK and they can't be undermined by then going to find somebody else who says something different and then saying the Inuit position is contested or the Inuit position is actually something other than the ITK position. So we have four regional presidents. Dwayne Smith is the president CEO for the New Valley Regional Corporation. Aluki Koito is the Nunavutungovic president. Charlie Watt Sr. who's the former senator is now the Makovic Corporation president and was actually the first Makovic Corporation president in 1975 and then Johannes Lamp is the president of the Ninozzi government and Ninozzi avut is the only region right now that has a self-government that exists as an order of government within confederation. So it isn't within Newfoundland and Labrador is within the federal government it is a part of the overarching governance structure. That's also very important to not just imagine that we are below municipal or below a province or territory or below even a federal jurisdiction. In many cases we create a new space that then interacts with all those other spaces while also hopefully bringing out the best of the existing spaces that we were in before we created these new self-governments. So it really is a melding of different systems and depends upon the enlightenment of the public service of politicians and Canadians to push these forward into their best possible selves. ITK is here in Ottawa we are just downtown at 75 Albert. We have about 45 staff some of them are here today and we do a lot of different types of functions but we can boil it down to a few core functions. One representing Inuit nationally and whether it's through constitutional rights that are then implemented for indigenous peoples in this country legislation consultation. There are national functions within a number of different issues that the government works on in any mandate and we are the partner in a number of those conversations. We also talk to Canadians about Inuit so we have a large communications function. This is what I'm doing here today it's just explaining Inuit to Canadians and it is a core function because there are only about 65,000 Inuit in this country and yes you understand that there are Inuit in Canada but how we fit and what our realities are and what we've been through are all things that require further conversations. We also play a key role in Inuit unity keeping the four Inuit land claim agreements and the four regions together working at a national level because we are one people Inuit have one common language one common culture even though we have different ways to express it different dialects of our language and very vastly different colonial legacies that underpin some of the ways in which we present to the world today. Here are just the three non-voting members of our board Nancy Karatek Lendell who is a long time liberal member of parliament who is now the chair of the Inuit Circle of Council of Canada Rebecca Kudlow who's in her second term as president of Paukjutit Inuit women of Canada and then Ruth Kavju who is from Arvi at Nunavut and is the president of the National Inuit Youth Council. So where Inuit reside? There are about 25 to 30 percent of Inuit who now live outside of Inuit Nuningat out of our homeland but I want to stop and pause about the places in which the Inuit land claims are within Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. These are all four vastly different spaces and traditionally territories have functioned very differently than provinces. Newfoundland and Labrador only joined confederation in 1949 and so our ancestors were aligned more with Britain and with Germany than they were with Canada up until 1949 because of Moravian missionaries who had orders in council from the British government to occupy large chunks of northern Labrador and provide missionary services and trade with Inuit from 1750 or so to the present day. In Quebec the way in which Quebec acts within confederation and the attitudes that it brings to national conversations are often very different than the policy responses that indigenous people or Inuit would have within that particular province. And then there was also the massive hydro lecture project in the 1970s that led to the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975 so the very earliest land claim agreement within Inuit Nuningat is within Quebec and Inuit in Quebec some are trilingual and some speak French very well. A lot of people have English as a second language. 99% of all Inuit and Nunavik still have Inuktitut as the language that they can converse in. It's very strong linguistically but it sets up really tough policy decisions about language of instruction in education and the compliance to provincial law around the use of French in communities. Also in Nunavut the creation of Nunavut out of the northwest territories and the idea that this country had created in an indigenous territory or in Inuit homeland complicates matters. It is also a huge opportunity and one that Inuit have been very proud to have been able to achieve but has virtually well very little own-source revenue in relation to Quebec or Newfoundland or other territories and does not have devolution. So a lot of the characterizations that you might have heard in the media about how Inuit or Nunavut is a have not territory and it's just billions of dollars every year being transferred from the federal government taxpayer money to scenarios that aren't working and the angst that that then creates within the media in this country and within the conservative voice all stems from the way in which all of these deals were constructed and the limitations these public governments have in functioning especially without devolution. And in the northwest territories there are a number of different indigenous peoples within the Northwest Territories and the 1984 Inuvial Final Agreement was predicated largely on the McKenzie Gas Project. So it was another deal that Inuit had to take or strategically took at that time so as to protect their interest in relation to a major natural resource project. So here are the spaces now that exist. Inuit Nunavut comprises about 36% of Canada's landmass 3.4, 3.5 million square kilometers over 50% of its coastline. And imagine this this is a space that is co-managed in its entirety between Inuit provinces territories and the crown depending upon the particular tract of land in the particular land claim settlement region. To think that we have that much territory that is homogeneously administered in this country but most Canadians would never know this and wouldn't understand what the considerations might be for that reality then push us into the next conversation that we have about the renewals or relationship and the policy implications that have to be present and center when we are talking about how we are going to work together moving forward. The idea that this country at a federal level is carved up into different regions and that the 30 or so federal departments think of the country in terms of prairies or Atlantic Canada or the West Coast or the Arctic or north of 60 the tree line. There are a number of permafrost lines. There are a number of different iterations of how this country talks about the Arctic and talks about other parts of the country and then creates lines for the way in which budget funding flows to those regions and then to those particular jurisdictions within those regions. For Inuit we have always been between a number of different policy realities so the north of 60 reality works for the new the Northwest Territories and for Nunavut but in an indigenous funding space there are a number of different indigenous considerations in the Northwest Territories and there are in Nunavut so you might have vastly different application of particular spots of funding for indigenous issues within that space. Then if usually Quebec is its own region and if Quebec is receiving funds for indigenous people they have a number of different considerations but they might not have the same idea about what should happen in Nunavut than the Inuit of Nunavut same with the north with Newfoundland and Labrador. These are governments that are colonial institutions in many ways and have not ever had to seed any control over the way in which funding flows from a federal source through its own jurisdiction than to Inuit communities. So a great example that that Heather Igliorte who is a professor at Concordia who did her master's here at Carleton in art history has talked about is Inuit art and the policy implications of Inuit art. The there was in the 19 the late 1940s early 1950s with the settlement the fourth settlement or core settlement of Inuit communities from just the the way in which Inuit were living on the land previously there was this new program that that was going to focus on art and the production of art that Inuit could could sell to southern Canadians or to an international market but Newfoundland and Labrador was not a part of that particular funding pot and so you if you think about Inuit art and think about Hinaw'i Asevac and the Cape Dorset print shop or the Pangerton print shop or the weaving studio or the amazing soap some work in from Nunavut or some of the other artwork from the Northwest territories that all had a public policy decision base so funding flowed into a policy space that Inuit and Nunavut were excluded from and then so we one segment of the Inuit population did not have access to then the money and the administrative resources and the promotion of artwork in the way that the other three did so as here we are in 2018 and we know Inuit art to be a certain thing but it excludes in many cases major artwork from Nunavut we still have artists in Nunavut and we are now pushing for those policy changes so that we are included in any conversation about art funding that goes to Inuit Nunavut but that is just another example of the practical consequences of not imagining this space and not imagining how funds flow into this space as you can imagine this is a very high-level conversation when it comes to politicians especially politicians who are meeting with you for 30 minutes or less and then go on to a whole host of other interests that actually have practical implications on their writings that they're trying to protect for their next election this whole space encompasses just four seats within the federal government and right now Hunter Tutu is the lone Inuit within the members of parliament and he's representing Nunavut so we also have had that consideration that politically at the federal level Inuit have never been a priority and one our small population to the lack of seats representation in the House of Commons through the fact that we don't fall into the Indian Act and four just the general environment towards indigenous people that is only recently changing so along comes this new government and I'm old enough to have been one of the key players within the Kelowna Accord and the two years that led up to the Kelowna Accord and the great work that First Nations, Inuit and Métis did to get ready for the Kelowna Accord even though the announcements were said to have originated on the back of a napkin two years of hard work that went into that not only from people here working in Ottawa in indigenous organizations but also Inuit from across the Inuit Nunangat who were mobilized to come in and talk about things like economic development and housing and education healthcare and that time unfortunately passed and the renewal the relationship didn't get a chance to have legs in that particular point in time and then for almost 10 years there was actually an attack on indigenous representational organizations on Inuit democracy and whether it was passive or or very direct it all had a cumulative effect of really scaling back interventions that helped our society move forward so along comes this new government and wonderful worlds words and a whole new world when it comes to access Inuit have never had access to federal government ministers like we have had in this particular government Inuit have never had access to the prime minister in the way that we do here in 2018 and those are very good things where they have the potential to be good things if you notice a lot of the wording within the reconciliation mandate letters talks about the relationship so having a relationship an individual relationship or an institutional relationship isn't necessarily the end goal that we see the renewed relationship is really a renewed understanding of our place and our participation and partnership in making life better for all Canadians and also making life better for Inuit Nunangat so there are a number of different policy areas where I could elaborate on but I'll start with suicide prevention and we at ITK have created a national Inuit suicide prevention strategy we have created it with three pillars it had to be Inuit specific globally informed and evidence-based we released it in 2016 actually the cover of the program today is a picture of me on the day of its release in Gujarat in 2016 but at the very same time members like Charlie Angus were bringing forward the crisis in Attawapiskat and pushing for indigenous suicide conversations there was even a special sitting of the House of Commons one evening in 2016 and what struck me about that particular conversation and that there was sympathy there was empathy for the people who were going through these hard times but the conversation was not grounded in any sort of public policy space legislative space the way that which you would create a long lasting change in the auto industry would be to ensure that there were specific subsidies or that all the economic considerations were met to create the the best possible scenario for that particular industry to thrive but all we were getting from conservatives, NDP and liberals were an empowerment of the most dispossessed voices to be told to that room for the purpose of empathy and sympathy it wasn't a public policy conversation it wasn't informed by any and I know that it's not necessarily something that ever happens in the House of Commons where you have public policy conversations by politicians but in this space it was just amazing that there was this lack of seeing suicide prevention as a public policy issue and also as a public health issue the idea that suicide prevention and tuberculosis or H1N1 or prenatal care they are all branches of a discipline and that we would imagine that indigenous suicide and indigenous suicide prevention could be talked about as a legitimate public health issue within this country instead it was just we don't know what to do we're going to empower those youth that are telling us what they want and that will be the entirety of our response and in a renewal of the relationship and in a time in which we are presenting to the government of Canada with a suicide prevention strategy that goes through social inequity as the key platform to reverse the risk of suicide in our population and then goes to specific mental health services within our community and talks about building particular skills within our young people so that they can have better coping skills and that we can reduce the levels of say teen cannabis use because we've found through research that early teen cannabis use especially in very regular doses delays brain function actually increases risk of suicide that we've already done a lot of this work and that what we're begging for are public policy interventions from a federal government that respect our communities and respect the issue rather than the ongoing conversation of it's indigenous so we either don't care or don't know how to do it and we certainly won't do it with indigenous people we will do it ourselves if we do it at all so there have been a number of times where I've pleaded with federal ministers to not announce something in relation to anyway after I hear what the announcement is because it hasn't been done with us and it actually gets us further away from the place where we want to be rather than gets us closer to it having a million dollars to do something is always great but if it is done without the public policy considerations of the group that is meant to impact to positively impact it could actually get us further away from the end results that we all want to see so we couldn't keep having these one-off conversations with the government of Canada and keep following around the prime minister and ministers and correcting them as they were trying to do good deeds but doing them poorly so we tried to work with the government of Canada to create an inuit crown partnership and we signed an inuit crown declaration in February of 2017 in a colloid and it imagines that there are priorities that inuit have and priorities that the crown has and in any given year we can work together on a list of shared priority areas that then we can both through inuit leadership and through federal leadership improve the lives of inuit or improve the implementation of land claims or create a better scenario for for inuit and the crown in this country so it took us a good year and a half to get to a place where the federal government could accept that it would partner with inuit in the way that we both could agree to so it isn't that inuit come to this table and say we demand in this way and you need to give it to us or else because that imagines that there's a passive relationship and one that either we're right or wrong or we're going to get our way or we're not we all have a stake in this and from the federal provincial territorial or inuit leadership everyone has a stake in improving the outcomes and in improving the relationship between inuit and canada so we created this work plan and there are a number of different components of the work plan and it is a great example of a renewed relationship and the path that we hopefully can take moving forward the idea that there will always be inuit leadership and there is a legitimacy in that inuit leadership and there will always be a federal government who has roles in relation to making inuit and canada a healthier place implementing the rights of inuit through the human declaration implementing the trc's nine and four calls to action there's always going to be a huge amount of work to do but if we can target things then we can really make a difference so in the first year of our partnership we worked on things like creating sustainable housing funding because we have 52 percent overcrowding in inuit nunangat compared to nine percent of the rest of the country and that led to four hundred million dollar investment in budget 2018 we talked about reconciliation measures because renewal of the relationship has to have a foundation of respect and it can't imagine that all of the human rights violations and human rights abuses that occurred in the past are in the past and we can't work on them anymore we just are going to press forward i know the prime minister and this government has actually received negative press for apologizing and it's unfortunate that that is the case because this country should respect its citizens and if there have been human rights abuses to any citizen in this country i would hope that a government would stop and pause and reflect respectfully give that actual group of people that class of people the dignity and respect of an apology and a response and redress to the human rights abuses that this country has done so david sir qua who presented here to you today has been working passionately on behalf of a relocated group of inuit in in nuna vood for the last 30 years of his life and we now at the inuit crown partnership table are pushing for that to be resolved between the claimants of that case and the government of canada and we're hopeful that that will happen in a short order so we have this space where government has agreed and even agreed that these are priorities and we might not always be the ones to do the work but just demanding that the work happen is an important step forward the apology to newfoundland and labrador indigenous residential school survivors which happened last december in roosberry labrador that was on our work plan as well as one of the key areas that we wanted to see in relation to reconciliation measures an apology that hopefully is forthcoming in relation to tuberculosis treatment in the 1950s is also forthcoming that also is a part of a larger renewal of a relationship around health and minister phil pot and i announced the elimination of the work that we will do together to eliminate tuberculosis in inuit new nangat by 2030 in 1950 in parts of inuit new nangat one in three inuit actually spent time in sanatorium in the south for tuberculosis care we had some of the highest tb rates ever recorded for any population many of those inuit didn't return home and many of those inuit lie in on mark graves in ontario and their families were never told what happened to them mothers and children were split up in the the treatment of care we've had cases where there there have been infants that were were taken to care where their families think that they were just adopted out and if you if you think about that and the effect of going to the hospital or going to the health clinic or wherever you would go and that ending up in the fracturing of your family and never hearing from your loved one again that that happened in canada the 1950s and 1960s deserves an apology and i think that we all no matter how well meaning the care was it was done in a way that disrespected human life and the effects of that are still profoundly felt by those who went through that and the fact that inuit still say we're canadians first is an amazing testament to our forgiveness and our resilience as a people so we do hope that this summer that will be another thing that will happen where those affected by tuberculosis treatment historically will be given an apology and that there will also be specific suite of programs that will be put in place to allow for them to go and commemorate their loved ones perhaps visit their graves if they know where those graves are and then have celebrations for their lives in their communities we also have created a database with with with what was indigenous northern affairs which is now just surna trying to keep up with the acronyms there it's hard to do but it has over a million entries where inuit who had received care or were put into care now are compiled in one database so family members can trace their loved ones and and the care that they received and perhaps find new clues on where they might have ended up there was one case where a person was taken from the kibble leg region to win a peg they had a particular type of tuberculosis and they were an infant so they were transferred to go back and then there was a transfer within Quebec so there was an actual hope at certain a certain point in time that these records show that this person might still be alive and imagine being a family member and hearing this new news about somebody who is presumed dead for 40 or 50 years and then could possibly be living that's the type of thing that this this government service now can provide it ended up that person did die but the family was able to go to their grave site and they would have never guessed for a million years that it would have been in suburban Quebec outside of of Montreal because that person came from thousands of kilometers away so these are the types of things that we have to work through we also have to think about the way in which which Canadian leaders respect you knew and I talked about it at the beginning in a political sense and we have had a number of fights with the government of Canada and with provinces and territories about the respectful work that we can do together and the platforms that we do the work within last summer there was a bit of a media firestorm about indigenous leaders boycotting the Council of Federation meeting in Alberta which is where all the premiers come and congregate once a year and the point of that was that we were summoned to these meetings in years past we were not a part of the formal agenda we did not get to influence the agenda at all and in many cases other indigenous individuals were brought to that particular meeting to present their perspectives when it was just primers and on the other side of the table so they basically created forums where they would confuse purposely confuse the rights of indigenous people within a space and then recharacterize it as a conversation we just wanted to have an opportunity to talk with the premiers about the shared work that we could do together in the same vein as the inmate crown partnership that we have specifically with the federal government I do hope that we can get to that place in this time of reconciliation where there that we can get beyond sound bites of an indigenous leaders mad and that's the story it's not necessarily needing any more intelligence than just that we're not going to something and we're upset because then that just polarizes the conversation I do hope that we can get to a place where we are seen for what we are and I often have gone through this world with people not really knowing who I am personally I'm vaguely ethnic so I can be Mexican I can be First Nations I I can occupy a number of those different spaces and it's it's allowed for me to connect with and have great conversations with people all over this world I still remember one time in Guatemala where people were really worried that I didn't speak Spanish and they were concerned like why don't you know your language and it was because they imagined I was indigenous person from South America but we need to know who we are and in this country I don't think that we're there yet when Canadians look at Inuit and just understand the complexity of who we are and how we fit and that confederation is beyond just provinces territories the federal government and municipalities and that has practical considerations for all of us in the way that we help reconciliation along the goodwill is there and every single time I talk about reconciliation people ask me well what can I do and the first thing that I always say is that you can understand more about the indigenous community in the place where you live and that's always something that people think oh well that's that doesn't seem very important but if you don't know the governance structure of the traditional homelands in which you actually live that is a deficit that you then come to the conversations with about what you can do within your place within your community to achieve true reconciliation and for Inuit probably many of you will never live in an Inuit community in Inuit Nunangat but there is that acceptance that we exist more than just as a people who have an amazing culture and you know have exotic wildlife species like polar bear and beluga and narwhal that we are actually trying to figure out the messy parts of the implementation of our rights and that there is a real positive outcome that we all want to search for together and that we do this together that Inuit want to be a part of a better Canada and want to contribute to Canada instead of it being always this conversation about why do Inuit want this or why don't Inuit move south or why would you live in an unsustainable place these aren't the conversations we need to have anymore and I think we can have much better conversations when we just educate ourselves a bit more and accept the Inuit democracy in this country thank you so much