Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses for attending today and for their valuable testimony.
I am going to selfishly focus my time today on Chief Mitsuing. Chief Mitsuing is from a community very close to my hometown.
Chief, thank you for being willing to come today. You have experienced so much in the short time I have known you. Your care and your concern and your commitment to your community have been inspiring to me as we have gotten to know each other.
I want to focus on a couple of significant things you have said to me over the last year, Chief. I know the committee is going to get very limited knowledge of who you are and what you represent, but we got to know each other when you declared a state of emergency last fall because of a suicide crisis in your community. You had to deal with the drowning of a child this past summer, and in your testimony you talked about the four suicides of adult members of your community, one of them being a mother and a grandmother who cared for so many children. You talked about the fact that the number of kids in your community who are on your suicide watch-list has grown from 40 to over 100 in the course of the last 10 months or so.
There is so much you have dealt with, but there are two things I would ask you to comment on in the short time we have together.
One, when you brought Elder Morningchild to my office to visit with my team here not so long ago, you talked about the impact that CERB was having in your community on things like mental health and addictions and some of those things. You expressed concern about that.
I'd like you to expand on that for a minute, but more important, I'd like you to talk about one of the solutions that you proposed for your community to deal with the suicide crisis and the children in your community, which was programming to actually teach people to be parents, to teach mothers to be mothers and fathers to be fathers, and how the kids in your community were begging for the leadership of the family unit.
If you could talk about those two things for a few minutes, the committee would be well served by your knowledge and what you share from the heart.