This gives me an opportunity to talk about our vision statement, “Canadian Inuit are prospering through unity and self-determination”.
The ITK is a vehicle for self-determination for Inuit. The expression of self-determination at this table, say, is that Inuit have a chance to speak to you clearly without any limitation about the priorities we have and the way in which we would like to interact and work with you.
On the other side, the federal side, there sometimes is an assumption that the federal government, or any number of government levels, can decide for Inuit what is best for Inuit, or can interpret, based on statistics or other measures, what things will or will not work, such as the nutrition north program. The fact that Inuit are not participating in defining what the eligible items are for the program shows that we have a lack of self-determination in the way in which that program runs. Canada is deciding what healthy foods will be subsidized and will be on our store shelves.
In this era and this time, we expect to have participation in the way in which those major decisions are made, decisions that affect our lives. In just about any different way, whether it's the implementation of land claim agreements, or the ability to represent ourselves and have the government respect the way Inuit represent ourselves, these are things that are works in progress. We're always driving towards higher goals and aspirations.
We have limitations to self-determination now, especially in the way that our colonial history and all the hurts of the past still affect our people today. We talk about it through historical trauma and intergenerational trauma, where the dysfunction we see in our society is often linked to the times when Inuit were brought off the land and coerced into communities, or our children were sent away to residential schools, or our dogs were killed, or our loved ones were sent away for tuberculosis treatment and never came back, and we weren't told what happened to them.
People still have to overcome all of these things. I think a big challenge to our self-determination is our ability to get over that colonial process. That's why we're here talking about how programs can be improved and about the priorities we have as a people that we know will get us towards the path that we need to be on.