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Weytk.
Good afternoon.
Thank you, Kukpi7 Casimir, and everyone here today for welcoming me to Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc. Thank you to the Elders. Thank you to the kids who just sang for us and inspired us. Thank you to all of you who came out today.
Thank you, National Chief Archibald, Regional Chief Teegee, and Chief Christian, along with all the other leaders here this afternoon. It’s good to see you.
I’m sorry I wasn’t here on September 30. It was a mistake and I understand that it made a very difficult day even harder.
You didn’t have to invite me back. I know that, but thank you for doing so.
I’m honoured to be with you all in this moment.
To the survivors who shared their powerful, moving, heart-breaking stories – I have heard you. To the families, to this community – I am listening to what we need to do to make amends as a country.
Earlier today, I went with Kukpi7 Casimir to pay my respects to the graves of le estcwéý, the children who went missing.
No child should ever have been taken from their home and forced into the residential school system.
No child should ever have been taught that their language, that their culture, that their identity has no value.
It is unacceptable that this was done to your children.
It is inexcusable that you and your families had to live through such horrors.
I hear you when you say that not only words, but actions, are the way forward.
You remind us that the healing path happens when those responsible – when Canada – take real action to make amends.
We will be working with you on what you’ve said the community needs, from funding the healing centre and working with you on an Elders’ lodge, to continuing to get answers and closure, and ensuring the proper commemoration to help the community and so many others grieve and heal.
And all across the country, we will continue to walk this shared path of truth and reconciliation, because what I’ve heard here, what I’ve heard from so many others, is that this is not a burden for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit to carry alone.
This is the truth of what happened to you. But it is not just your story. It is the story of Canada. It is all of our story, and it is all of our responsibility to know, to learn, to understand, and to walk the path forward together.
As I said earlier, at the same time as that residential school up the hill and hundreds of others across the country were teaching children that they had no value because they were Indigenous, teaching them that their language had no importance and that their culture was worthless, teaching them that they themselves were worthless, every other school in this country was teaching the same things to every non-Indigenous schoolchild.
That’s how systemic racism happens and continues. The intolerance and racism and colonial mindset, it was present in schools generations ago throughout this country, contributing to building systems and institutions and, yes, a country that values Indigenous lives, Indigenous kids, Indigenous people less. And not actively in the hearts of every individual, but through systems and habits of governance and leadership, and through institutions that do not understand or respect the values and traditions that have created this incredibly strong identity that we celebrate today – an identity that you celebrate and share with us.
Those strong Secwe̓pemc women – four generations who came to share their truths, to challenge, to demand better. To recognize the loss not just of the abuse of residential schools, not just the trauma passed along through generations, not just the weakening of language and cultures, and the breaking of chains that stretched back tens of thousands of years, of Elders teaching next generations, growing the bodies of knowledge and understanding.
But the loss of taking away the very ability to be a parent, the ability to show love to one’s child; something so basic that residential schools ripped out of this community, out of communities across the country, and left all of Canada weaker for it.
Think for a moment how much stronger this country, all of us in this country – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – could be if non-Indigenous people had been able to learn alongside all of you the knowledge of this land, of countless summers and winters of discoveries, of understandings. Imagine the stewardship that we’d have as a country had it not been for the wrongheaded colonial mindset, the racist ideology, the cultural genocide that tried very hard to take all that away, not just from you, but from us.
In 2015, as Chief Christian pointed out, I made a commitment just up the road here, to true reconciliation.
I made that commitment again a few months after that. And I think we all thought that we’d be able to get things done quickly. That we’d be able to undo – rapidly – decades, generations, even centuries of institutional inertia.
Progress has happened. Action has happened. I know my friends on this stage know that very well, but not nearly enough of it has happened.
Yes, we moved forward. We recognize and are implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Yes, we moved forward with historic legislation on protecting and supporting Indigenous languages.
And Dr. Ron Ignace, Shuswap speaker, is the first Commissioner of Indigenous Languages of Canada. That is progress and that is action, but there’s more to do.
Yes, over the past three years, we’ve been developing child and family services legislation so that kids at risk don’t get removed from their communities into foster homes to lose their languages. And I was unbelievably pleased, when I visited Cowessess First Nation a few months ago, that we were able to sign the first child and family services Coordination Agreement that took kids out of the provincial system in Saskatchewan to keep them in their community in Cowessess.
And we’re going to continue on that action.
The federal government has turned over all of the records we have for residential schools to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg.
When it comes to the Kamloops Indian Residential School, for example, we have full or partial records going back to the late 1800s – everything but the first two years this school was in existence. And if there’s more, we’ll work to find it. And if there are other organizations like the Church that have it, we will stand by you, and make sure that we get that information too.
Because we can’t have reconciliation without truth.
We have work to do. And, yes, the government has a lot of work to do. Recognizing the hard work that you have done is not a way of saying that we don’t have even more work to do; we have a lot of catching up to do on the work that you have already done.
And I take that on directly and personally.
But let us not forget that what took generations and centuries to break, can never be fixed overnight – not if it’s going to last.
Not if it’s going to respond to the challenge and the promise that Ashley made, of giving a better future to her daughter, of drawing on the strength of her grandmother and her mother to be able to provide a better future.
And that’s on all of us in this country. And that’s the realization that Canadians have taken on following the leadership right here in Tk’emlúps, a discovery in May of 215 Indigenous kids in the graves just up the hill.
This is what Canada is, and that realization came as a real shock to an awful lot of non-Indigenous people in Canada.
We love to tell stories of ourselves as being this great, open, tolerant nation.
We compare ourselves with smug smiles to the news coming out of the United States, and we say, oh, isn’t Canada great and open.
And I think these past months have been an awakening for many Canadians to the reality.
And it’s easy to get shocked and outraged and say, well, that has to change! We have to fix it! Somebody ought to do something!
And as much as the federal government needs to do – and as much as the federal government needs to do much more – it’s on all of us across this country, and specifically, not only on Indigenous people across the country.
It’s on non-Indigenous schools and universities, it’s on orders of government – from municipal to provincial as well as federal – it’s on our artists, our musicians, our dreamers, our business people, our banks, our teachers, our moms and dads.
Everyone across this country has a role to play in reconciliation, and that doesn’t mean everyone has to get it right all the time – God knows we’re all going to be making mistakes as we figure this out – but we need to keep at it.
And let us not throw up our hands and say: because there remain boil water advisories in this country, nothing has been done.
It’s a poignant example, but it’s one that we see all the time, where you will hear all the time that the government has failed to eliminate all boil water advisories in this country.
You’re right, we set ourselves a goal to do that within five years. And in 2015, there were 109 or 105 long-term boil water advisories.
We’ve now eliminated 118 long-term boil water advisories with about 50 remaining to go. But for the first time ever there is an action plan, and a project lead, and a path forward for each and every one of those 50 remaining boil water advisories.
So, as you – Indigenous people and leaders, and non-Indigenous people – look and challenge us all to do more on reconciliation, let us remember that it is urgent and important, and we have to keep working on it. But we cannot let challenges or things that are more difficult than we expected cause us to throw up our hands.
It’s the kind of strength of leadership that perseveres over years and generations. Wayne, talking about my dad and your run-ins with him back in the early ‘80s: there is a lot of work to do, and I think of my dad as well. It was his birthday today, and my 14-year-old son’s birthday as well – they share a birthday, which is a pattern in our family.
But the work that we need to do goes beyond what we need to do today and tomorrow. What we have an opportunity to do together now is to set this country on the right path, to do the hard work and the heavy lifting of making those actions concrete. Of stepping forward. Of building new schools, of funding health centres, of funding Elders’ lodges, of declaring museums, of creating historic sites. This is the work we have to do.
And there is no one thing that’s going to be a magic bullet.
Nothing we can do is going to erase the intergenerational trauma that lingers, that manifests itself in thousands of different ways across the country from community to community.
But everything we do together can make things slightly better. And we'll build on that slightly better to make significantly better, and then much better.
And suddenly, a generation from now, things are different.
We will still look back on the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century as a time of darkness in the relationship between Indigenous people and Canadians.
But we will also have successes to point to, because we can bend the curve, we can change the path into the future.
And it is through honest, open dialogue, and a commitment to work together and to find common ground, even though there’s lots of things we’ll disagree on. It’s remaining committed, not just to the words, but to doing the hard work that’ll get us there.
That is what we must do. That is the task that we have as citizens, as Canadians, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. We have work to do, and to do together.
There is no reconciliation without truth, just like there is no path forward for anyone unless it’s a path forward for everyone. I am ready to keep listening and to keep learning as a partner on this shared journey.
Thank you for inviting me, and through me all Canadians, to be with you on this road to reconciliation.
Kukwstsétsemc.