Thank you very much, Ms. Shauk.
We have eight minutes left. There were a couple of things I wanted to ask. The chair rarely gets that pleasure.
We've heard so much information today that I think it's really important for the committee to understand the difference between the needs of women on reserve and the needs of women off reserve, the urban women coming from Vancouver, which is where I am.
Aboriginal women seem to be no one's child. Nobody wants to accept responsibility for them. The federal government says they're off reserve, don't look at us. The provincial government says it's a federal jurisdiction for all aboriginal people. Generally speaking, the municipalities are the ones who have to deal with the reality of their lives. As Stella well knows, from having gone to Vancouver, a lot of these women end up on the streets. They end up being sex trade workers because they have no choice. They become addicted. They're exploited enormously. When all of these women were killed, as we saw in the Pickton incident, these were women who did go into the shadows, into the dark places, so that they could get a $5 trick to buy their next fix because they had nothing, or to get $5 so that they could feed their kids. This is the plight of women who are off reserve and in the cities. The solution I've heard you saying—you sort of hinted at it—has to be very different than for the women on reserve.
I'd like to hear just a quick synopsis about what you think one should do to deal with the fact that no one wants to take responsibility for aboriginal women off reserve.
On reserve, when we went to Nunavut and other places—and I find this distressing because you mentioned it, Ms. Gabriel—we heard that aboriginal women seem to think that violence is just their lot, that this is what their lives are going to be like. There is the sense of absolute hopelessness because of the intergenerational residential school thing. They grew up not seeing parenting, but knowing that they were bad, to speak their language was awful, their culture was terrible, they were little savages, and they had to change, and to be who they were.... Many of them were treated with sexual, psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical violence. For them, violence is something that has been handed down intergenerationally. Women don't want to leave the reserve; they don't want to leave home. Many of them believe that their husbands or their partners are not necessarily finding ways to deal with that same problem that all aboriginal people have.
On the concept of a shelter, a crisis centre, I'd like to hear.... If you had a crisis centre, how would that work if the women did not want to leave home? We also heard that when the police came in, the police wanted to lay a criminal charge and the women didn't want them to lay a criminal charge. So they didn't report it because they didn't want their husband or their partner to be taken away from the family, and they were disrupting the whole reserve by this. So they shut up and waited until it got so very bad.
If you had crisis centres there on reserve and they needed to move from a crisis centre to a shelter, to a transitional house, and then to second-stage housing, which are three different entities, how would you see that working? Would they have to leave the reserve? How would they move from the family? There's a conundrum there. How do we resolve that conundrum?
If you could answer those two questions, one about the plight of the urban aboriginal woman and the other one.... Everywhere we've gone we've heard about the need for a national, comprehensive, integrated, interjurisdictional, long-term strategy working with communities to ensure that they can do that, and that's the only thing that will work. You just repeated everything we're hearing everywhere we go.
Can I have an answer to those quickly? And then I want to thank you for having come.
Ms. Gabriel, I'm looking at you.