Okay.
I tied “nothing about us without us” to the funding of autonomous indigenous women's organizations so that we can spread our wings, like I did, in women's centres and in university. Studying women's studies there is where I learned about what happened to me.
It becomes so normalized. There is a book called Black Eyes All of the Time. I think we need another book that talks about the sexual abuse of indigenous girls and how that becomes so normalized that being trafficked isn't so far removed from our reality. The remedy to that, as far as I'm concerned, is capacity building amongst ourselves as indigenous women.
I never know how to do this respectfully, and I do want to be respectful. I have concerns about the fact that we have a well-resourced Assembly of First Nations but a poorly resourced Native Women's Association of Canada that can't adequately represent our interests across the country, much less at a local level. We really need to do that capacity building ourselves. As a result of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, in 1972, I think, non-native women got women's centres all across this country. They got Status of Women Canada and the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women. All of these things happened for non-indigenous women. We need our turn to do that. We need to decolonize from what was done to us in the Indian Act.
That's a long process. I fear we're not even starting that. We're still under the umbrella of our band councils and under this banner of colonialism, without specific focus on gendered colonialism, gendered racism and gendered poverty. Those things are pretty much absent, and they're eclipsed by the bigger questions of colonialism.
That's what I talk about a lot.