I'm Brenda McDougall. I was raised in Saskatoon. My father's family is originally from the
Fort Edmonton Métis families who migrated to Red River in the 1850s and 60s and from
there we disperse across western Canada. When you're Métis you're from a collectivity
and our responsibilities to each other are greater than our responsibilities to ourselves
and I think knowing and understanding that shapes the way that you respond to and interact
with your community but it also changes your self reflection of yourself and so being healthy
is being a part of that collectivity and knowing your lineage is a part of that and
if you can't be from a community because it no longer exists and there's so many of
our communities that no longer exist then it's building a sense of community in whatever
place that you live and those things are contributing factors to not only your personal
health but the health of our larger communities, our larger nations. I think they're integrally
intertwined because it's about responsibilities as opposed to rights and for so often we talk
about our rights based dialogue, our rights to this, our rights to that but we very rarely
speak about our responsibilities to one another and when you feel like you're a part of a
collectivity it makes it easier to deal with your day to day stuff, it makes it easier
to deal with your own whatever your problems are physically or mentally or socially because
you know that you have that support network that can support you and can help you through
your day but in turn you also have a responsibility to uplift other people. I would urge especially
indigenous Aboriginal policy makers to stop using colonial language, to stop siloing ourselves
into Canadian state legal definitions of what it is to be Aboriginal in Canada because as
long as we continue to allow that to happen our communities can't be healthy. We've forgotten
our reciprocal obligations to each other, we've forgotten our responsibilities to the
greater whole and what I mean by that is so in Northern Saskatchewan although all people
whose last name is Moran are related to each other they all descend from a very specific
group of people they are treated differently based on the legal category that they hold.
So the people who are treaty have greater access to health services branches because
it's funneled through federal funds as opposed to the people who have to deal with the provincial
government. The child welfare structures are different and as a consequence of these things
people think or believe that one or another of the group is getting special treatment
so they become jealous of each other. They treat each other as though they're not relations,
they don't tell their children that they're related to each other. These are things that
would have been common knowledge 50 years ago but with the welfare state, with the provincial
health care systems, with provincial education systems but with an overlay of federal responsibility
for Indians people have forgotten or they've chosen to forget those realities of who they
actually are. So I think we have to stop allowing Canada to dictate who we are and that's easier
said than done. I'm not optimistic but if we don't try then we never start to walk past
this.
