Unknown Speaker  0:00  
An elder in my community, I asked when, before I was an architect, I asked, Why are there not more average architects 1951. He said, we looked at our community and to see what we needed. And we decided, first what we needed were lawyers. Because we had to fight the government, we had to fight for our treaties and for our own rights. So he said, First, we needed we decide we need lawyers. Then as residential schools started closing, our kids started getting scooped and taken away for the foster care system. And so he said, then we decided we needed to have our own social workers, because we need to bring those kids back home, and not let them get taken away. Then he said, since we're having all these kids come back, we need to have our own teachers. So we put pushing education that was sort of the next tier. And then he said, we have a lot of our communities are remote. And we need medical clinics. So we need to have our nurses. And more recently, doctors are now getting educated. And he said, architectural come and said, Don't worry, he says just gotta be patient. And and that's an attitude that I know in our nation, that has been something that has been talked about the niska nation, as the first modern day treaty is how they are promoting the treaty. That was done in 2002. During the Treaty Negotiations, at one of the community consultations, when the elders were just getting frustrated with Indian Affairs and the lawyers. Everybody's sitting up at the front of the room. And he stood up and he says, I don't know why there's such a rush to sign this treaty. One of the things that he got mad at that one of the negotiators from the government, he said to you, this is a job. You fly up here, you have a meeting, you fly home to Vancouver, and you go on with your life. He says, but this is our life. We're fighting for our life here. So I don't want to rush it says if it takes another 100 years, I'm okay. So when he said that it was just like, very powerful in the room and, and I remember, just like, that's our attitude that we have to have, right? It'll come but there's no need to rush things.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai