For the past year, I've been supporting the Haudenosaunee Confederacy chiefs council, which is the inherent governance structure of the Haudenosaunee people. We look to our laws, our creation stories and the things that make us distinct, and we look towards how our laws set down governance structures.
I look to this federal government, and they have promised a nation-to-nation relationship yet have almost entirely ignored our traditional governance structure the entire time they've been developing laws and policies.
We look towards what it means to have human rights. It means to live under our own laws, our own jurisdictions and our own cultural practices. Without having that kind of respect for what indigenous nations bring to the symphony that is humanity, we're not going to address the governance issues, the structures and the systemic issues that create vulnerability, that create disunity and that create the lack of social cohesion that exists in indigenous communities.
There are really high-level, broad philosophical questions that then begin to impact people's lives on a day-to-day basis, where indigenous women are denied their basic rights and human dignity. This is especially true for me, because I come from a matriarchal culture where our clan mothers, who are the stewards of our land, are continually denied their right to exercise our laws and governance in Canada.
Those are the kinds of human rights we're talking about here. We've fundamentally failed to entrench that type of true nation-to-nation relationship in policy and law, and unless that's going to be addressed, we're going to continue to see indigenous communities that don't have, or are denied, the ability to participate freely in our modern society.