My name is Adam Akpik, and I'd like to offer my perspective to the honourable vice-chair and member of Parliament David Yurdiga on his question on decolonization, as well as to the rest of the committee.
I found, through my Inuit studies at Nunavut Sivuniksavut, that you can separate decolonization into four different areas. Those would be physical, intellectual, economic, and political. My perspective on decolonization would be finding that middle ground between the societies that indigenous people and Inuit once lived historically and today's market-driven and colonized economy, and for the federal government to support Inuit in the way that they believe that our society will work.
Another thing to touch upon is what Toby said about the lack of mental health workers in the communities. According to Stats Canada statistics from 2006—and I wish I had more updated ones—at that time we had the lowest ratio of physicians, the lowest ratio of registered nurses, and the lowest ratio of psychologists. Although we were above the national average in social workers, many times these are not registered social workers, but they get hired on as social workers anyway. This does not account for or represent the revolving door for these employees who come to the territory. Often there is a revolving door because of a lack of cultural competency and training.
There was a story just last week of a psychiatrist who was due to fly to Clyde River to provide her services, but she had no cultural competency training and she had no contacts, no colleagues to reach in Clyde River. This also doesn't take into account the ripple effect on things such as education; often in our schools, because we don't have this educational psychiatrist, we're not meeting the needs of a lot of our students.
That's what I'd like to say today.