Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to say thank you to the honourable Member for Thebacha, Mr. Miltenberger, for seconding this motion. Mr. Miltenberger, I recall, said, I think it was in 2005, seven years ago, I remember having this discussion in 2005 and at that time it was very emotional, very charged, and very good.
The Premier did say that we are the only government in Canada to recognize this day and I want to say something about this government. It’s an honour to be amongst you as my colleagues, to say we’re still the only government, we are leaders up here, believe it or not, in the eyes of Canada, that we can take a step forward, as Mr. Nadli said, and become giants and say we forgive and want to move on. Truly, in the eyes of Canada, there’s a people, survivors around here, as Mr. Miltenberger said, there are four, five, six, seven of us that grew up in the system, for good or bad, for right or wrong, we know the experience. We became pretty good in sports. So good some of us want to be NHL hockey players or basketball players. Some of us even met our sweethearts and married them there. We had family. We have family right across the North. We have family from Tuk, Sachs, Deline, the Wells, Providence, Simpson. We have brothers and sisters. We grew up with them. That’s the beauty of this institution. When Mr. Miltenberger says he wants to look and try to see the good side of it, that’s what I look at today. That’s what I look at today.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is helping us. They are telling us the strong message that you’re okay. Those messages are pretty powerful when you’re five years old or six years old and told that you’re no good. Don’t speak your language. Those messages go right to the core of who we are and hurt us as we grow up. We have to keep working on ourselves. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is doing that. Just go to our jails and you’ll see the victims. The victims that worked all their lives on not being good enough. They are so bad that we have to put them in jail. Go through that system.
Today I’m very proud to be here in the House amongst my colleagues, and putting this painful, painful past behind us. It feels good. I feel good about what we are about to achieve. We are reaching a turning point in history of each of us, each and every one of us. A few years back I said we took the leap, we started sharing our pain and our humiliating experiences at the residential schools. When our whispers grew into a roar, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, like I said,
was founded by the survivors. We needed to give voice to our truth and nothing but the truth. Can the government handle our truth?
There is a turning point in our history as well. Through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, all Canadians are learning about the human cost of national policies towards Aboriginal people, other people, and education, institutionalized racism, and the oppressions that are black marks of the worst kind and Canadians are ashamed of it.
There has been an official apology from the Prime Minister of Canada four years ago, something we as survivors believed would happen and that did happen.
Believe in your dreams and don’t let anyone steal your dreams. What we can be proud of as Canadians, as Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people, is that today, together we are facing history. We are brave enough, as a nation, to be honest with ourselves and the world, about our past and for what we want the present to be and our path to the future. The stories of the residential schools will go into our history books. We are already working on that here in the Northwest Territories along with Nunavut.
We will, all of us, all Canadians, look back on the residential school era as a terrible low point, like the low points of human wars. Like Martin Luther King, we Aboriginal people have a dream. We see our children’s children as well educated in their own tradition and the histories and the language, and the western knowledge, as people call it. We will govern ourselves within Canada. We will share. It is our way. It is our law as told by a great leader Yamoriah, who symbolizes the beaver, the pelts, and the arrows, and the Bear and the Mackenzie rivers banks flow through Tulita. This is more than just a dream. It is happening. We will say to our grandchildren, see how far we have come? We want to see how far you can go.
That, my friends, is partially the legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I thank the commission and their staff for all the work they have done, the planning, the listening, the encouraging, the enabling, the healing.
I am so proud of the people who are speaking out and the courage they have shown. I thank them all right here in my heart. People like Lawrence Thrasher, who was the first person to speak at the TRC hearing in Tuktoyaktuk. He was a good gospel singer and he sang at that hearing right from his soul. People had just been hanging around thinking about the awful things they had lived through, and the abuse that was going on that has ripped out of the residential school. I want to quote Lawrence’s words that day: “Somebody needs help here today too. We know it and I say it’s time to release. It’s my Inuvialuit people. Time to be bold and to be brave. Time to be light and start a new life.”
Lawrence passed away not even two weeks ago. He knew, like we know, that it’s a long road that we are travelling. We are far from it. There is a lot of healing yet to be done. Different people in different communities are at different stages of their journey. We have to support them. We have to be strong in our commitment to this.
I do want to thank the ones who spoke up in times when residential school wasn’t the hot topic like today, to thank the parents for helping us when we didn’t know what lies ahead of us, and to the ones who gave their lives for me and all the survivors to stand here today. I do want to thank this government for recognizing the residential schools and to be an example to the rest of all of Canada, that as a government we do recognize our people. For that I thank you for this special day.
I ask for a recorded vote.