In regard to the residential school system, that was a very devastating impact on the aboriginal people in the Northwest Territories. It ruined the language, which kind of took away from the culture. There is a sense of disparity in the communities. I would suggest that sense of disparity, the lack of knowledge about the history, leads to individuals' disparity and their spirit is down.
In any society, when the spirit is broken, there are problems associated with that. I believe our education and graduation levels, high percentage of alcohol use, smoking, health problems, all come from this lack of history and lack of spirit about their history and about themselves.
To that end, I think, there needs to be a big push in the aboriginal community and with this government, to establish cultural centres that would depict, as I said earlier, the history of the people, the culture, and try to revive that broken spirit.
I think that leads to a lot of negative impact on the individuals in our communities and as a society in the Northwest Territories. I think this department, in cooperation and in partnership with all other departments of this government, should look at working with each First Nation community and identifying the resources to establish cultural centres.
It could be used for tourism as well. We always say tourism is important for communities, but people do not like to go to communities just for the sake of going to communities. If we have centres such as this, they will be able to go some place and say, "Oh, this is the history of the community. This is the history of the people." You could have a website that you could share with the rest of the world, not only with each other.
I believe that if I could get the Minister's thoughts on that. Is he willing to work with the other departments along with the aboriginal communities in establishing cultural centres, which deals with heritage, culture, language and tourism and information centres? I would appreciate that, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.