Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 3 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Tuesday, December 3, 2002
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 9:05 a.m. to study issues affecting urban Aboriginal youth in Canada and, in particular, to examine access, provision and delivery of services; policy and jurisdictional issues; employment and education; access to economic opportunities; youth participation and empowerment; and other related matters.
Senator Terry Stratton (Acting Deputy Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Acting Deputy Chairman: Our witnesses today are Ms. Jennifer Podemski and Ms. Laura Milliken from Big Soul Productions.
Ms. Jennifer Podemski, Big Soul Productions: I am co-owner and operator of Big Soul Productions, an Aboriginal- owned and operated production company in Toronto.
Ms. Laura J. Milliken, Big Soul Productions: I am in partnership with Jennifer. I am originally from Kettle and Stony Point Reserve in Southwest Ontario.
Ms. Podemski: Beginning with my background, I was raised in Toronto. My mother is Saulteaux from Muscowpetung First Nation in Saskatchewan and my father is Israeli. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, where we were the only native family in the area. Basically, I had to represent my heritage and culture throughout my brutal youth with an alcoholic mother. I was pretty ashamed of my native background.
I was immersed in my culture from both sides, and performing, acting, dancing and theatre saved my life. I became involved in the arts at a young age and pursued them for many years. There are many parallels between my life and Laura's.
Ms. Milliken: My upbringing was similar to Jennifer's. I grew up in Scarborough, Ontario. My family lived in a relatively nice, suburban neighbourhood that was mostly Caucasian. My sister and I were the only native kids in our elementary and high schools.
My father is a product of a residential school. He has been plagued with alcoholism and numerous other residential- school-related problems. He has never recovered from those problems. As a result, we grew up dealing with his problems. However, I was fortunate to have many positive influences in my life, including teachers, art, other people's parents and my mother. My father had some positive influence on me: he is artistically talented and a beautiful person, generally.
I was involved in the arts in my youth. I played the flute for many years and entered drama class when I was in high school. Art saved my life.
My father and mother always told us how important it was to sing and to play music. I did not get in touch with my Aboriginal heritage until my late teens, when I started writing, and thus discovering who I was and where I came from.
I had to do that on my own in order to expand on the limited education I got in high school.
Ms. Podemski: I will start with the early beginnings, before I met Ms. Milliken.
To continue on, I believe that education is an important point. Growing up in an urban centre, especially in a place like Toronto, for the most part, I was the only native representative in any given situation. There was a lot of ignorance and racism, due to lack of education, from the rest of my peers.
My Aboriginal ancestry was abandoned when my mother left my family. I was brought back into it when I became a professional actor and started performing. All the roles that I performed were native roles, and I got very much in touch with who I was in the acting community. I was fully immersed in it, which led me to the point where I was making a living as an actor in various film and television efforts from the Canadian perspective.
Dance Me Outside was probably the one that changed it all for me and propelled me into a new place in my career, which then led to The Rez. I continued to work as an actor, but I found it very difficult to break out of the constraints and barriers that were put on me by the industry. Working as just an actor was difficult, because I was put in this category of ``the native actor.'' It was like I was the only one working, which seemed strange.
I often worked on films based on native stories that were written, directed and produced by non-native people, and which were incorrect, derogatory and uninformed. I was often the only native person on a set with a supposedly entirely native cast.
That leads me to being asked to host the Aboriginal Achievement Awards in 1999 in Regina, which I was honoured to do, because John Kimbell from the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards had saved my life many times by helping with funding to pursue my career and goals. That is where I met Ms. Milliken. It was from that point on that my life took on a whole new meaning in terms of being an Aboriginal woman in this country and living towards a greater purpose in using the arts and my background as a filmmaker, performer and, in some ways, an advocate, to create a better life for myself, my future children, grandchildren and the children and grandchildren of people I know.
Ms. Milliken: I echo that. I felt like I was on the verge of something better that would contribute to the greater good when Jennifer and I met, joined forces and decided to take on our important work. I followed a long road to get there. I actually took many turns. I, too, was plagued with many addictions that I have fought very hard to overcome.
My career started when I was a kid. One of my favourite games was playing ``President'' with my friends. It was actually ``Office,'' but I was always the president. I always knew I wanted to get into business. I always knew that I was driven. Our neighbours would look at our family and see my dad, who was visibly native and also drunk. A lot of judgment was cast.
There was a belief that my sister and I would be married off and pregnant by the time we were 16. I am very pleased to have proved them wrong. Everyone in my family now has some kind of post-secondary education. I am happy to have just gotten through that. I am happy with where my life has gone.
I had started with a college education, and journalism was the field. I knew I wanted a voice and I wanted to write. I went to school for three years and received a journalism diploma. I received the Gill Purcell Journalism Scholarship for Native Canadians. I worked at Canadian Press for some time. I then went on to work for Canadian Business and Canadian Profit magazines at CB Media, which then was part of McLean Hunter and now Rogers. At 26, I became the manager of the promotions and communications department. I was headhunted by John Kimbell to work for him and, as a result, ended up being his associate producer for the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards for two years.
I say I took many twists and turns because those are all very different jobs that I undertook in that time. What was great was that I was introduced to so many different worlds. I realized that the media was a great way to get my message out. It gave me an opportunity to find out more about myself and where I came from.
I was reading a lot of coverage of Aboriginal people and I was influenced by it. I soon came to realize that it was not all true. A lot of it was biased. We were not really hearing the true or accurate stories of Aboriginal people. I wanted to contribute to that.
I also wanted to contribute to a more positive voice, perhaps something inspirational, such as showing our own people that we are doing great things. That is how The Seventh Generation, our television series, was born. It is important role modelling. I did not have many positive influences on the Aboriginal side while I was growing up. My main influences were my music teacher and my mother. Although I looked up to my father for being a great artist, musician and a wonderful person, he was plagued with issues. It was very hard for a young person to see past that. I did not understand how. All I saw was what everyone else saw, which was a drunk Indian. It is a tragic thing for a young person to grow up and live with that, and to start to believe the stereotype, especially when it is your own father. I do not any more. At the time, I was ashamed of who I was. Thankfully, that has changed; I love my father. I think it is important to show that. I needed, at the time, to see somebody positive who was a brown-skinned person, a native person.
That is why Jennifer and I believe so strongly in mentoring and role modelling, and in presenting these incredible Aboriginal youth on television at a national level. Kids watch TV. Let's face it — people recognize those they see on TV. We thought we should be exploiting that, which we are now doing to the best of our ability.
Now I will turn it over to Ms. Podemski to talk about The Seventh Generation.
Ms. Podemski: The whole idea is to reinforce images, at both a national and, hopefully, international level, of native people that are not just based on the way people think we look. The idea of saying: ``I have light skin and brown hair, and I look like what some people would think of as Asian, but I am a native person of this ancestry. I want to represent who I am and where I am from. I do not represent everyone.''
The idea is to take people from across the country, urban, rural, from the reservations, from the small communities, the big city and everywhere else, who look different, who are all native and all dealing with the same identity issues as I am. Whether you are dark or light, have curly hair or blue eyes, whatever it is, we all have the same issues; we come from the same places, the same parents, the same kinds of people and the same cultures.
The idea that Laura and I came up with, which we later called The Seventh Generation, was to create some sort of platform, which became a television series, where young native people could speak their minds, talk about who they are, where they come from and the things they have struggled against from the time they were born.
These are the barriers that they have overcome, the racism and the systemic adversity, to become successful doctors, cultural leaders, athletes, actors, musicians, lawyers and so forth, and show the rest of Canada that we are here and these are the kinds of things we are doing. We are not just what you read in the National Post. We are not just what you read in the Toronto Star. Most people writing these articles are not even native. It makes a big difference when the perspective is coming from a native person, because it is educated and influenced by the community. It may not always be something we agree with, but we believe it is time to start having our own voice and representing who we are from our own perspective. In our television series, The Seventh Generation, we decided from our first year and moment of meeting that we needed to have everyone's voice. We need to show everyone, from someone who has grown up in a completely Cree background, learning and knowing the language, knowing grandparents, living on the reserve and experiencing that sort of life, to the person who has grown up in the city, a brown person in an adopted family, not knowing who they are but knowing there is something deeper there. We need to explore all of those stories and encourage young people who, like Laura and myself, were not seeing anything. We had nothing to fall back on, no role models or reinforcement in the media. We had nothing but our images there in front of us, our parents to be ashamed of. We are lucky now to have things like APTN and other platforms that are reinforcing those images.
Out of conversations like that came the idea for The Seventh Generation, a 13-part television series we produce, write, direct, shoot, host and facilitate in every way. Our pilot episode in 1999 was a labour of love. To give you an anecdote before we show you the clip, our first experiences with The Seventh Generation were very difficult because no one seemed to believe in it as much as we did. We had a difficult time convincing people that this was a viable, marketable product from an industry perspective. We had a difficult time soliciting support from the communities, because there are different mandates than supporting youth in this crazy media type of way. We had a really difficult struggle getting our first pilot episode made. What finally happened was, APTN took an interest and provided a little financial support that went a long way. We were able to get Adam Beach, the biggest native celebrity you can find, Ryan Black, who at the time was on The Rez and was both exciting and excitable, and my sister, Tamara Podemski, the only native person on Broadway in the musical Rent. The three of them were in our pilot episode and we had them doing grip, gaffing, lighting, putting up walls, construction and driving. We were doing everything; we had these people who believed so much in this project.
From that, we got our first episode and were able to take it around and say, ``Look, we did it, and this is what it will look like. You said that we could not do it, that it could not happen and it is not viable.'' That led to our 13-part series, which we will get into after we show our first clip of The Seventh Generation and a collection of people we have profiled over the past three years. I hope you enjoy it.
(Video presentation)
Ms. Milliken: That was just a short clip out of the hundreds of hours of footage produced over seasons one and two. Our third season will begin January 2003. To date, we have profiled 91 Aboriginal youth achievers on our show. They range from doctors, to traditional hoop dancers, to actors, to musicians. We are pleased to tell you that we undertake every possible effort to ensure that we represent a cross-section of education and career sectors. We also try, to the best of our ability, to represent First Nations, Inuit and Metis youth. That is also important to us.
I almost cried actually during that video because the production has been an emotional ride. It never ceases to amaze me how incredible those 91 youth are; and there are many more out there. I want to touch on how we made the show. We employed a new kind of software technology called ``Final Cut Pro.'' When we began three-and-one-half years ago, people would ask what we were talking about, because it was so new. Now we use Final Cut Pro 3. We also use desktop computers and laptops. We do not have million-dollar edit suites, but rather it is all done in our office. Many people wondered how we could use an unexplored technology to make a 13-part series for television. We had to struggle through the infancy of Final Cut Pro and work out all of the problems. I think we came out triumphant, because our show rivalled any other shows on the network. We also did our own French version for season one and our own closed captioning for all three seasons.
Season one can be seen on the Saskatchewan Communications Network, on ACCESS Network in Alberta and on Canadian Learning Television. Season two can be seen on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, or APTN, ACCESS Network and Canadian Learning Television. Thus far, APTN is our only broadcaster for season three, but we are confident that it will be on the other networks as well. We were able to do this fairly cheaply compared to any other 13-part series. We were fortunate to have the support of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, the Department of National Defence, Justice Canada, the Solicitor General, Health Canada, Corrections Canada, Natural Resources Canada and the Federal Interlocutor for Metis and Non-Status Indians. We had a great deal of support in the first and second seasons, which made this possible. We were not so fortunate in the third season, so we had to become inventive.
Hopefully, we will regain that original support for season four because this show does have an impact on youth. That is evident when we go out to the communities and meet youth who are excited to have The Seventh Generation there. People are beginning to recognize us in the communities as part of Big Soul Productions or The Seventh Generation. Ms. Podemski is happy to be recognized as Jennifer, the host from The Seventh Generation, rather than as ``Sadie'' from The Rez.
We will be trying to get a fourth season started. Until then, we have season three for you to enjoy.
Ms. Podemski: I will explain a little about The Seventh Generation, which propelled us to open a production company. We made the commitment during the summer that we came up with the idea for The Seventh Generation to start a production company and to become a permanent fixture in the television and film industry. We decided that we wanted to not only represent native people, but also to infiltrate the industry and become a presence, doing mainstream and important work that is reflective of our culture. We also wanted to just be there — to be available. We also wanted to make risky choices by producing television content that is unconventional in its casting choices, in its story lines from the communities and in its selection of a fully native production team, from the writer on up. That was our mandate.
Big Soul Productions is a fully functional production house. We conceive ideas, produce creatively and adopt all the necessary roles to make it happen. We have had many struggles throughout the last three-and-one-half years just to stay alive, but we do have a purpose: to continue to produce programs such as The Seventh Generation. We have done many other shows. Into the Music was a 13-part series on Aboriginal musicians, and we have done documentaries and promotional videos. We want to represent ourselves as strong, educated producers, not just as owners of a native production company. That is the direction in which we want to grow; we want to eliminate the constraints that we put on ourselves.
To be able to walk out and no longer say, ``I am a Native producer,'' or I am a Native actor.'' You have to get rid of those constraints and say, ``I am a producer, and this is what I produce,'' and start thinking bigger, brighter and better and about being a permanent fixture in the industry.
Our other mandate is to train youth. It is most incredible to us that we can walk into our office and everyone there is a young native person who is dedicated to becoming an active part of the film industry. These people work every day to learn something new. The youth who appeared in that piece you just saw has been with us for a year. That is the first piece that he has edited. We are proud of that, because we have been working to develop his career as an editor. That is one example. Everyone in our office has a long success story, a long story of how they got to work with Big Soul Productions and the process they went through since they have been with us.
There are many unsuccessful stories. People think the film industry is an exciting and glamorous place to be all the time, but it is hard work. What we are doing is grassroots. We are not able to make a lot of money because our content is not mainstream. In the industry, it is very difficult to prove yourself as a viable, marketable product when you have native people in your product. We have heard everything. We have heard that people will not want to watch this because it is not native enough. Who is determining what is native enough? Who makes the rule that Buckskin is native content? We want to change that. We want to change how the industry and the world see natives and start to be proud of the kinds of jobs that we are taking on. We want to make kids proud of who they are. We want, ideally, to reinforce those images in a positive way, so that kids can wake up every day and feel strong and proud of being a native person, no matter what they look like or where they come from. We want them to know they have a bright future ahead of them.
As you saw in our ``Resource Minute,'' that is also important to us. It is what we can do for the youth whom we cannot train personally. We can say, ``Look, there are thousands of programs out there. There are so many programs, resources, scholarships and funding available for you to go to school to become what you want, to go on internships, to travel the world and to continue your education. There are mentors available.'' We need to give the kids that information, because almost everywhere we go — and we travel to so many communities. In any given year, we will travel to up to 100 communities, maybe more — we hear the same thing: ``We did not know those programs existed. There is nothing here that provides those resources to us. There is nothing for us. We did not know that we could be that. We did not know. We did not know.'' The alarms are ringing in our heads as to why. The question is why? It is what we ask ourselves every time we are together. Why is it this way? We need to do our part in providing the information and the resources.
That is what we want Big Soul Productions to be. We want to be a production company in the mainstream industry, of which we are just scratching the surface. We want to be a training body or mechanism that gives Aboriginal youth the opportunity to join this medium, because there are hardly any native people in the film industry, yet there are so many stories told and images sold relating to them. It really has come to the most ridiculous situation when the unions have no Aboriginal representation, and we want to change that. We want to change the representation at the film festivals. The native forums at film festivals should not take place before the actual film festival starts. They should not marginalize us, put us to the side and set up a function for native people just because they feel they are responsible for doing that.
We want to change the climate of the industry by putting native people in the creative positions and the power positions, like producers. There is no reason why Ms. Milliken and I should be two of a select group of native producers in North America.
That leads me to one of our dilemmas. You cannot be a full-time advocacy group and full-time production company. It is very hard. We work very long hours, and we do a lot of crying because it is emotional work. We are just trying to scratch the surface and do what we want and love while at the same time affecting young people, trying to make them proud of who they are, so they do not have to feel the way we did, as ashamed as we and our parents did.
Ms. Milliken: That brings us to RepREZentin'. We knew, once we were doing The Seventh Generation and it started to catch on, that Big Soul Productions was in with the youth. We told them, ``We know who you are and we know the work you are doing. We think you are great. We want to support and promote you.'' However, that is not really our job. A lot of youth started coming to us saying, ``How can you help me? How do I get into acting?'' We heard that question so often.
We came up with a concept. We call it RepREZentin'. We wanted a hip title. Kids are using that term these days, I believe. We call it RepREZentin' with R-E-Z in the middle of the word. The original intention was to undertake this project on reserve, but it has since become both an on-reserve and off-reserve project, which we will get into later. RepREZentin' is a training project in which we go into a community or an urban centre and audition and interview all Aboriginal youth between the ages of 13 and 30 years old.
We will accept up to 50 participants into the program. We have them perform on the show as well as all functions behind the camera: grips, gaffers, directors' assistants and producers' assistants. Whatever we can teach them to do on the set or in the process of making a half-hour film, they will be a part of it.
We come up with the story by interviewing the youth to find out what is relevant to them, what is going on in their community, ``Tell us about yourself and what you would like to see represented in a half-hour drama about you. This is your chance to say what you would like to say in a dramatic format.'' This works. Kids say, ``Wow, I watch The Rez. I never thought I would be starring in a nationally televised drama.''
Most people told us that this could not be done. We were told a thousand times, ``You guys are crazy. You are insane. You are talking about doing a half-hour drama on digital video with completely inexperienced youth actors. This cannot be done. We are not going to buy this. It is not viable.''
We made the first one in my community. It was a pilot project for RepREZentin'. We had 50 youth participants. It cost $25,000 to make in total, and all the kids got paid for their time. That is an important thing. We not only train them for a week or 10 days, we also employ them, because they are an important part of the production team. That is important for them to know in order to feel valued.
We pay them for that and provide them with resources. We give them all of the information that they may want to go forward with this type of career afterwards, a binder full of resources for the film industry, a binder full of resources about clinics and addictions counsellors in their area, places they can go and the kids' help phone number. We are not there to counsel them. However, during the process of the pilot program at Kettle Point, we started to realize we were responsible for 50 youth.
Are we in over our heads? An important part of this is that we take in Aboriginal mentors in filmmaking. We have native grips, native gaffers, native directors, native writers, native acting coaches and native makeup artists. They ask if we work on big movies. They can say, ``I have someone to look up to now; I want to work as a gaffer on Jackie Chan's next movie.'' That is exciting for them, too.
I had a moment in Kettle Point during our first one, when I had given one of the youth a hug and said, ``This is your morning hug.'' Youth started coming up to me later in the day and said, ``This is your noon hug, Laura,'' ``How about your six o'clock hug, Laura?''
By the end, we were having hugs every hour. We had kids who could not leave the production office. They wanted to have somewhere to go and they were not doing much, just sitting around talking, listening to music and watching our show on VHS while we were busy on the set.
Film is a game of ``hurry up and wait.'' There was a lot of down time for them to just talk. There were kids who had not spoken to each other in years. Kids who thought they hated each other became friends again on the set. That showed the dynamics of teamwork, self-esteem and media empowerment. We had them build their own set and employed people from the community to make the food. We pay for services from the community wherever we can. It is not always possible. We do whatever we can to inject our money into their economy.
While the kids were getting a lot of out of the experience, so were we. We started to realize there were bigger issues at play that perhaps we could not cope with. We were taking on very serious subject matter with our scripts. We are not talking about being late for school. We are talking about Aboriginal youth issues, and we found that a lot of them are the same, from the West Coast to the East Coast to the North. Aboriginal youth have a unique set of issues to deal with that not everyone understands. We did not know how to deal with them, except to provide them with people they could look up to and an interesting and stimulating environment in which they could flourish — something artistic, something fun and energetic and something that would reach them. In the first episode, we used all rap music, street sounds and hip-hop and they responded to that. They responded to the story and its harsh language. They responded to our approach. They responded to us all being young native people. It was a formula in which we found we were on to something great. It is not like you can take any kid and put them into a system that is created for everyone and expect them to survive. A kid from Kettle Point going to school in Forest may not work. A lot of these kids need to be eased into this completely different world, the culture shock and racist remarks they have to deal with, the misunderstanding of their culture and the lack of resources available to them. Who can I talk to who will understand if I am a native kid in a school away from my community? I talk to adults who left the reserve, went to a university and said the only place they felt comfortable was the First Nations house, because they could talk to people they could relate to and understand. It is a difficult transition, even for kids going to high school. I do not have the numbers, but the Aboriginal youth dropout rate from secondary school is extraordinary.
We felt that we were really on to something, and if we could not keep them in school, if they did not go on to take a job in film or even go on to university to study film or television, they have had a chance to feel great about themselves. They have had a chance to work with us and see themselves on TV. We went back for the first screening of RepREZentin' in Kettle Point and there was a packed house. It was a great event. The kids got dressed up and had limos to bring them to the screening. We had everyone there and it was truly magical to see them beaming and seeing the work that they did together.
One of the councillors actually stood up and said, ``I wish we could get this many people out to a community meeting.'' That is the power of the media and the dramatic format. A lot of people probably came out to see Jen and the other actors, but we need to use that as much as we can. That is where we excel; in bringing this to the people, using it and making it work for the kids.
We went up to Fort Chip for our second one. We met Chief George Poitras, the former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation, in Halifax at the AFN AGM conference. He took a great interest. We were showing RepREZentin' in Kettle Point at a trade show there; he saw it and asked how soon we could get up to Fort Chip. Our answer was ``as soon as you want us.'' They raised all of the money privately to bring us up there, and it was an incredible experience. We are talking about a remote fly-in community undertaking a half-hour drama. This is unheard of. Thankfully, this time we had the support of APTN. We had lacked network support in the first endeavour, but we proved ourselves.
Ms. Podemski: Fort Chip was a big relief for us, because we thought this project was really good and that we were on to something, training youth, creating new writers and directors and helping people participate in the industry by producing this project. We thought it was great. We worked hard, sent proposals, had meetings and spent seven months negotiating to bring this to a community. Nothing happened after Kettle Point. When we met the chief, the fact that he actually wanted to bring us to his community was incredibly inspiring to us. I found him very progressive because he wanted to take risks and make an unconventional choice in providing youth with programs.
A friend of ours pitched the idea to CBC that she would follow us there and do a documentary for CBC News: Sunday, hosted by Evan Solomon. We would finally be able to let Canada see what it is like behind the scenes. The kids who usually take the most interest in projects like this are considered the most troubled kids. What they really are is the most unloved. They may be the ones who need the most hugs. We had a very difficult experience in Fort Chip right off the top, when one of our youth participants dropped out. We recognized that he was very troubled and we had to let him go. However, the process was still beautiful because we brought young kids together with older kids, and the whole time we asked everyone to be clean, to not partake in any drugs or alcohol and to be very present.
In the end, we had a fully functional film set. When we wrapped, we would go back to the production office and all the kids would be there. They would stay until the last minute — it was always the kids and us — because they wanted to hear the music and to enjoy intelligent conversations. Some of theses kids were just out of jail; or awaiting sentence; or waiting for the RCMP to pick them up and take them to Edmonton. These are intelligent, beautiful and talented kids who are not being given a chance, which is all they need. If you could see the talent, the hope and the inspiration, it would be evident that they only need a creative outlet, with people to look up to and who would talk to them on an intelligent level, not push them aside.
In many ways, that is the hard part of leaving — we cannot guarantee that that will continue. On a side note, we will talk later about how to make these projects sustainable.
However difficult it was at the time, we came out with a beautiful product. The documentary aired nationally and was watched by many people. It has been successful in that many now understand what it means to take an active role in the community and to make brave choices in the film industry. The two go hand in hand. We find that film is incredibly inspiring because it is such a powerful medium. Television is a popular focus for many people and we are inundated with media everywhere; and it excites youth — the MTV generation. One young actor may be watching a friend set up the lights while another holds the boom microphone. All of this makes them realize that they are a team.
We have a video clip of our three projects: Kettle Point; Fort Chip; and Regina, which we just finished and which was our first urban initiative with RepREZentin'.
(Video presentation)
[Translation]
Senator Gill: Your efforts in respect of young Canadian Aboriginals are commendable. You have had contacts with people from the Temiscaming and from Kahnawake. As you know, French is the second language of a number of young Aboriginals in Quebec who speak no English at all. These youths are grappling with the same alcohol and drug problems as other aboriginals. They are talented, but have few opportunities to vent their frustrations. They have very limited access to national organizations such as the John Kimble project. You are not likely to see young francophones receive national awards because their efforts are not recognized. In Quebec, more than half of the Aboriginal population, surrounded by francophones, does not speak English and does not, therefore, have access to the networks, to printed material or to television programming. Have you had any contact with these youths, or should I say, do you want to have any contact with them?
[English]
Ms. Podemski: Yes. We have had contact with many people from those regions who can communicate in English. That is a difficult issue because of the language barrier. We want to encourage producers like ourselves in Quebec to do the same thing. We want to encourage this kind of thing across the country, in the communities where the kids do not speak English or French. There are a few kids in that position.
The access to the foundation and resources is there. We want to encourage the idea that there is a possibility of accessing any information that you want and that you can be recognized. With the technology that is available, we want to show the youth that all they need is a tiny amount of money, a voice and, maybe, a camera in order to use media to empower themselves on the national level. We want to show people how to do that. We want to access those communities. However, we would love to work with people from those communities who can make it happen there. We would love the opportunity to bring it ourselves, but it is difficult to make this happen anywhere, because the communities have to be convinced that it is important.
We all know that the youth want to be empowered and they want things like this to happen. It is all about the funding. It does not have to be us; it could be a French producer. There are French native producers who are making programming for APTN or CBC. It is really about encouraging the communities, the band councils and the community leaders to bring this media empowerment to the youth.
Sometimes I wish that we were francophone and that we could do it ourselves, because we can get innovative with the funding.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: It is important to understand the situation and to help youth gain access to financial resources. Generally speaking, when departments and government have in the past provided funding to organizations such as yours, they have asked young people to get involved. One problem that exists in the language barrier. It is extremely difficult for young people to get access to funding.
[English]
Ms. Podemski: Our organization does not receive funding. Just to be clear, because I think sometimes we want to be. We will do everything we can to teach other producers, people or leaders the empowerment program, and hopefully, they can take it to all the communities.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: All I am asking is that you stand in solidarity with young francophone Aboriginals.
[English]
Ms. Podemski: Absolutely.
Ms. Milliken: I agree.
Senator Sibbeston: You are inspiring. I will just come at you in a kind of provocative and challenging way, since you are in that mode anyway, and had to be in order to succeed.
I would say you are a novelty. I wonder if you are so unique that the system is supporting you — the industry and government. You speak of the assistance you have had from government. However, sometimes people or projects rise to the top and receive ongoing support from society as a novelty or a showcase. Perhaps you are that for the Aboriginal people in Toronto and in the industry. Otherwise, the system is closed and the fate or plight of Aboriginal people is that they try to make a living, moving to the urban centres, but do not do well. There is a big gulf between the Aboriginal society and the larger Canadian society. You are unique, a bit of a novelty, and what you have accomplished is not possible for other Aboriginal people.
Ms. Milliken: I appreciate your being provocative. That is important to point out. Other people would probably say the same thing. We have not been supported. It has been the most challenging three-and-a-half years for both of us. I walked away from a very good job to do this. I landed myself in the middle of something extremely risky. For every penny we received, we were out there meeting with people a hundred times, presenting a very professional package and proving that this was going to have an impact.
People were taking a chance on us in the beginning. Once we got to a certain level, those people said ``You are on your own; we are cutting you loose now.'' As a result, we have not become dependent on anyone. We have clients. We are a for-profit company. We have not made money in our first three years. We have been supported morally more than financially. We have taken on a lot of other jobs. These are our dream projects that you have seen. We do all of our other ``waitressing'' jobs, such as the 15-minute videos, in order to support the important work that we would like to undertake.
I believe that it is possible. Anything you want to do is possible. That is what we are always trying to tell the youth with whom we work. We say, ``You can do this. Get yourself a camera. Get yourself a Macintosh computer.'' I know that there are resources available to them in their own communities. There are youth who have been successful in obtaining funding to buy a Macintosh G4 computer, a camera and a Final Cut Pro system. That enables them to make a film.
One of the young men who currently works with us as an intern is 18 years old. He is from Kahnawake. He has already made four of his own films. I believe that it is possible for anyone to do whatever he or she wishes. It is more difficult for kids coming from the reserve who have never been involved in the industry because they do not understand. You do not understand what you are walking into. It is intimidating and scary. It is scary to walk into any job, coming from that place. It is easier if there are the right support systems in place.
We can be a support, but we do not say, ``Come to us and we will get you into this,'' or ``We are going to do this for you.'' We are not in the business of doing things for people. We are in the business of running a production company and finding the business to support it.
As a result, we can then take an additional step, as Aboriginal people, and say, ``We do have a certain level of responsibility to take this message to the community and try to get them involved in the industry and the business.'' We want to get them involved in things other than film, such as business success, achievement, taking pride in yourself, educating yourself and taking responsibility for your own life. How can we do that?
We must draw the line between social advocacy and running our business, because running our business is our first priority. RepREZentin' was our way of saying that we can bring both worlds together. In many ways, we have not been supported.
Sadly enough, I have heard remarks such as, ``You cannot do this,'' or ``You cannot make this happen.'' I have heard that more often from our own people than from anyone else. The lack of support within our own communities is what will limit our youth. That has to change.
Senator Sibbeston: In the business that you are in, television and production, how far away are Native people from producing something like My Big Fat Greek Wedding?
Ms. Podemski: It is so possible.
Senator Sibbeston: It has been very successful. It has been an insight into Greek society and culture. I always thought that the Aboriginal people had the same kind of stories and experiences that would be delightful and interesting for Canadian society to see. Someone needs to produce that. Is that possible? Are you close? Do you foresee something like that being produced? Would it be successful?
Ms. Podemski: Absolutely. It is so possible. Endeavours like that need to be supported by the industry. In Canada, it is very difficult to make a film without support from the government, from Telefilm. It is changing the way society sees Native people and Native stories. It is very limited.
You could go to any network on any day and say, ``I have this show that I would like to make into a series.'' We had REZ and we already touched on that. It is difficult, but possible. You have to be willing to spend 10 years of your life making it happen.
In a lot of ways, many people see us as novelties. However, behind the scenes it is the roughest, toughest job and you want to quit every day because of the lack of support, the people who let you down and all of the empty promises. It is difficult to keep going. You would think that for people from an urban centre who are relatively connected in certain circles, it would be easy. It is not.
What we are trying to say with the show is, ``Look at these 91 people from across the country; these are all youth who made it happen, from the REZ, from the East and West Coast, from the South, the North, wherever. They made it happen.'' Those are 91 examples of how it is possible.
It does not have to be done by the film industry. However, we have to start feeling very excited and empowered about being native and stop saying that there is no way it will happen. I have been there. I was ready to quit it all when I saw that there was nothing on TV for me. There is nothing out there that represents who I am. I give up. I do not want to do this any more.
However, it will take a very long time to change the way things are. It is all about saying, ``You know what? If I am going to invest in anything, I want to invest in my future. I will spend 10 or 15 years going to school, getting an education and making it happen. I will start a youth group. I will start an advocacy group. I will start a youth movement.''
Ultimately, we want to bring people together and say, ``Let's mobilize and get together.'' We do not want to be the centre of it. We are trying to put people out there to spread the news, get together and mobilize. Create a youth movement. Let's get together and have our million-man march and change the way the world sees us. Let who we are empower us.
Our method is through film and television. However, there are other people's methods that may be through culture, medicine and grassroots organizations. It is all about getting everyone together and saying, ``Yes, the resources are there. We are ready to give those resources.''
It is incredible that people such as the scriptwriters for My Big Fat Greek Wedding do not know there are 3,000 script competitions out there, that you can get U.S. $30,000 if they like your script, and suddenly you can make a movie. It is about bringing those resources to people. It is very frustrating, because the industry too does not recognize it enough.
Senator Léger: I do not know where to start. However, I like the way you started. ``Art saved my life.'' We have seen that in many fields. If only we could understand the value of the arts in general.
However, we all know that the arts are not a product. You cannot sell it. You cannot touch it. You cannot move the price up and down. It is not saleable. That is why there is so little money coming in. Receiving grants from governments would only be the opening of the door.
You talked about a ``resource minute'' for your people. Do you think it would be possible to broadcast that on CBC and Radio Canada, nationally from coast to coast? I am saying that because I am from the Maritimes, and perhaps you imagine that everyone can get that if they want to look at it — although I know they will probably look at the American stations first.
Is it possible that you can give us a minute on just who you are? You are talking to us so we can understand. Sometimes, we do not want to understand, of course. We know that. However, just as you are here presenting something to a Senate committee, you would do it regularly to the nation. Minutes? I do not know. There are 365 days in a year.
Senator Léger: We, the non-Natives, need to know. I know that sometimes we do not want to know. It is starting to get us. Would the major stations listen? No way? Would they hop in?
Ms. Podemski: It is hard to say. It is hard to get in those doors to find out.
Ms. Milliken: Part of our dilemma has been that not only did we come into this industry as unseasoned producers, but we also came as young, female and native. We automatically had three strikes against us.
The first thing we heard was, ``Why do you not co-produce with someone more experienced?'' It was always a non- Native man telling us that. They proposed that we take all our ideas and hand them over to someone with more experience who is not Native and who is a man. We would share the rewards at the end.
We said, ``No. We will do this completely on our own. We will struggle and fight for everything we put on TV, for its integrity, its voice and its purity.''
We still face that battle with the major networks. It does not matter that we have done hours of dramatic programming, and that we have done 39 episodes of informational programming.
Just getting a foot in the door is one of the hurdles. Getting on the air is another.
Senator Léger: Is there anything the government can do to help squeeze in a few minutes? Can we do anything to help? You are in the business.
I know what you are talking about when you mention stereotypes. It goes even further. They are afraid. It is the money. I understand it is a business. It is an industry. Is there anything the government is able to do? We cannot force them. We are a democracy. Is there anything we can do to help out? You mentioned that lists and grants helped you out. It is not to keep you marginalized; I would not say that, because you are going home first. Maybe we are getting a little jealous. Is that what is going on? I do not know. I wish everyone would have the chance to learn what I am learning.
Ms. Podemski: There are many different options. You are talking about putting resource information into a mainstream network such as CBC, even CBC Radio. There are many ideas out there. You can have one minute a day with different native people from across the country giving one fact about natives that people did not know. It is a great idea. Who do you go to with that idea? It needs someone who wants to get to that point, and it is a full time job, developing that idea, taking it to CBC Radio and saying, ``This is really important. I will find the money to put this one or two minutes per day on the radio. We will have a different native person from a different community giving out a fact every day of the year.'' People do not know the facts.
Senator Léger: That is what I would like to bring in throughout the country.
Ms. Podemski: We will write the proposal. Where do we send it?
Senator Léger: In French and in English, naturally.
I would like to say a word about Senator Gill's point. Even if it is not on television, on French television, Native people are doing something professional in theatre.
Ms. Podemski: Theatre is very strong.
Senator Léger: Maybe not on television. There are three or four stations, but I always like to think of broadcasting from coast to coast to coast.
Ms. Podemski: To add to that, even APTN, the broadcaster for one of our shows, has requested that we do not do anything in French because there are francophone producers that should be doing that and have the right to do that. We do not want to take that work away from them. It is not our place. We should be giving that to them.
Senator Léger: In time, I am sure we will run out of material. What is done in French will be presented in English, and vice versa. That is inevitable.
What can we do here to try to open it up a bit? I know it is an industry. I know it is the money. Make it accessible to us. That is what I have to say.
Senator Tkachuk: I should like to congratulate you on your entrepreneurial spirit and to advise you to keep at it. Ten years from now, when you are known all over the world, people will say how lucky you are and forget all the hard work that it takes to be tremendously successful.
I was struck in your presentation by how something ordinary can be made extraordinary. The fact that a bunch of young people are working, are involved, are talking to each other and have jobs — those are ordinary things. Your show showed me how ordinary things can be extraordinary — being successful in your community, whether you are a filmmaker, which is Hollywood stuff, or a doctor, a lawyer, plumber or electrician.
You are obviously bright, but you are not exceptional in that. There are many bright people around. You obviously have talent, but that is not exceptional, either. You are more successful than others, perhaps, and you are also educated. You achieved an education and went on from there to build a life for yourself that I think will be very successful in the future. Why you and not others?
Ms. Milliken: There are so many answers to that question. We actually talk about that all the time, because there is no shortage of talent or people with drive and determination.
Much of it is environmental; where you come from, the kind of support you have. Even though my father is plagued with alcoholism, and as a result, has a poor work ethic, I was lucky that my mother worked three jobs to support us. She instilled a very strong work ethic in me. She made me work hard for my money.
I got my first job when I was 13. I made $3.15 an hour scooping ice cream at Baskin Robins, and I was managing the place within a year. That was the kind of person I was. Much of that was because my family did not have any money and I would like that pair of jeans, and seeing how hard my mother worked and knowing that when I grew up, I would like to be able to provide for my children. I had many things driving me.
Many people are not so fortunate. Many people come from a place where, unfortunately, neither of their parents is supportive or working. Sometimes they are plagued with other difficulties or disorders. They cannot concentrate. It could be something as simple as not being able to concentrate in school, and people think they are dumb. In the last year, I have worked with more people with dyslexia than I ever met in my life before. I bet that many of the kids that I went to school with were misunderstood because they had dyslexia. It could be something as simple as that, or it could be that the child is not eating right before going to school, or eating too much sugar, or is hypoglycemic or depressed and no one recognizes it. It gets to the point where they cannot even attend school because they are so depressed. It could be malnutrition.
When we are talking about success and achievement, we are talking about things as simple as that. Are you eating right? We do not allow sugar on the set or allow kids to drink pop or eat chocolate bars or cookies.
Ms. Podemski: Most of us are diabetic, and we do not even know it.
Ms. Milliken: Yes, and hypoglycemia is linked to depression. How many people have actually drawn that conclusion and gone into these communities where so many kids are taking their own lives and said, ``Maybe we should look at how much sugar you are eating. What you are eating? What is happening up here?'' It could be something as simple as that.
My mom always ensured we had something healthy to eat.
I could have gone the other way. Many things saved me and many people were an inspiration to me. It is about the people. Just seeing a positive image of your own people is important. I do not know how I rose above the problem, because I did not see any, or at least not many, when I was growing up.
Ms. Podemski: My ultimate drive has always been to prove to the world that I am not everything they say I am. It comes from growing up hearing, ``Your mom's an alcoholic, you dirty Indian,'' and proving to the world that that is not true.
I am not lying when I say my support is the arts. Teachers saw something in me and put me on the stage, forced me to be in the choir and in dance class right from grade 1. It is about the teachers and the education system recognizing those things and nurturing them. I was very nurtured by some of my teachers. I was lucky because of that.
I come from not a very-well-off family, so I was working by the time I was 11 or 12. My grandfather had a store and I worked for him. I was volunteering at hospitals. I had a strong work ethic because I did not want to die or have my spirit die. It did die for a long time. It revived when I saw Michelle St. John win the Gemini for Where the Spirit Lives. She was the first brown or native person that I ever saw in that limelight, and I cried for so many nights, praying that I could be like her. Years later, when I was starring in a movie with her, it was like my dream came true. I prayed for it so hard, and I did everything that I could to get to that point. I did so many dance classes that I had no social life. I was always dancing or singing or acting. I was always the kid in the class who paid last because my dad could not afford it. We would barter or something so I could keep dancing. It was the drive to work hard and make money so I could dress nicely, so people did not think I was what some said I was. Perhaps it was a negative thing, but it gave me the drive.
To be completely honest, I am embarrassed to say that I do not have a university education. I graduated from Grade 13, and that was it. I started working professionally as an actor. I dropped out of university because I was working so much as an actor that I found it difficult to balance things. If I could do it all over again, I would get an education and probably become a politician or something like that.
Senator Tkachuk: You do not need an education to be a politician.
Ms. Podemski: We all get our drive from different places, but ultimately that was mine. I have to say that seeing that image of Michelle holding the Gemini changed my life and changed the way I saw my future. Before that, it was people like Madonna and Janet Jackson. It is the role models who save your life.
Senator Tkachuk: There is much credibility to the theory that the most successful people are those who had little self-esteem and who wanted to overcome what people thought of them. Many people in North America are talking about that now.
It seems strange that people would think you were Asian. I am always being taken for an Asian, and my daughter is always being asked for her treaty card. As an East European, I would say that is the ``cousin thing,'' because Asians invaded most of Eastern Europe, and there is a theory that some Asians were the earliest settlers of North America. Perhaps we are all cousins.
Ms. Podemski: I know we are all related because we are all human.
Senator Tkachuk: I was interested in the story that you were trying to get at in your film clips. Many of our racial problems stem from the fact that we all have a romantic view of our own history. I would say that native Canadians are often seen as nomadic, when only the Plains Indians were nomadic. The Indian nations that were here when the white man arrived were farmers. They had an agricultural sector. They were fishermen on both coasts. They were nomadic on the Prairies. They were warlike and had a military structure. They must have had business people, because they traded with each other. They had entrepreneurs, obviously. The Cree are not native to the Prairies. They came from Ontario and Quebec. When they acquired guns, they went out and killed the Indians who lived on the Prairies, pushed them up against the Rocky Mountains.
I am trying to get at the many similarities rather than the differences. It was good to see the positive images that you were portraying on television. As is the case with all minority groups, television often looks at the deviant. That is what the news is all about. You will see the very successful Black artist on television, and you will see the crack addicts, but you do not see the great majority of middle-class Black people in the United States who go about their ordinary lives like everyone else. The image is wrong.
I congratulate you on that. Continue to tell your story.
Ms. Podemski: I want to add to the similarities. That is the pinpoint of The Seventh Generation, the archeologists, the scientists, the doctors and lawyers. We are not doing anything different. We have been doing these things for thousands of years. It is connecting it that way and saying, ``We were scientists and doctors 600 years ago. We were medicine people. These are not new ideas or concepts. The application may be different, but they are not that far from your nature.'' The people on the show are saying, ``I am a psychiatrist, but they existed 600 years ago as well.'' It is not that far-fetched.
Ms. Milliken: In RepREZentin' in Regina, which we are now calling Moccasin Flats, because that is what they call the native ghetto in north-central Regina, we do have positive images. However, we are actually showing what life is like for the youth. We asked them, ``What do you want to talk about?'' What emerged in our conversations with the youth in Regina was, ``Well, people get stabbed here.''
There is gang violence. People get murdered. You have to lock everything up all the time and there are prostitutes on the street 24/7. In this film, we have a prostitute who is taking her child to work with her. We have youth being murdered over drugs. That is their truth. I do not know how many Canadians realize that there is a native ghetto in Regina.
Senator Tkachuk: They are also in Saskatoon and in Prince Albert. It is brutal.
Ms. Milliken: In our windswept plains, we have these brutal worlds with which not many people are familiar. I did not come from that place. I think that is another reason I emerged and was able to survive. I do not know how I would have fared in an environment like that. You would have to be an incredibly resilient individual. You have to be very strong and have a very strong family and support mechanism. Thankfully, there are a lot of support systems emerging and many people trying to deal with the situations in these urban centres.
It was very troubling to us, and we thought these were bigger problems than we could deal with. We were not going to be able to go there and take this 13-year-old girl off the street. I am not able to do that, and I do not think I can interest her in participating in RepREZentin' and coming to work with us for 10 days. We know there are people who are working on that.
The parents are not coming to meet us. We are not seeing enough parents getting involved in their kids' participation in this project. I am responsible for your child for 10 days; do you want to meet me? Of course you do. It does not happen enough. There are not enough parents or community members involved. Too few people in the native community are in control of the money. As a result, a lot of their families and friends get the jobs. It is incestuous in that way, if you will excuse the term.
I think that the way the youth funds in particular are administered is troubling, because the money is not getting to the youth or the initiatives they want it spent on. They need a larger voice in saying ``This is what will work for us.''
Ms. Podemski: It has to be all about the youth. Their voices need to be heard loud and clear by community members and across the board.
Ms. Milliken: There are amazingly innovative youth out there, like the kids at Redwire Magazine. I had youth in my apartment this weekend who were all clean and sober, singing songs, telling me stories about the Haida Gwaii people and how their people fought, historically, like maniacs; now they are singing their songs together. This is the kind of cultural emergence that is happening. They are taking pride in their heritage; it is becoming cool to be native. There are thousands of young people across Canada creating great initiatives for themselves and their peers. Those are the youth we need to listen to and help with their projects.
Senator Hubley: Thank you, it has been interesting and a great joy to meet both of you. I wanted to go back to the arts for a moment, because both of you started off in your presentation by relating how important that was, and Senator Léger has carried on with that in some of her questions as well.
I think you mentioned you played the flute. It was not necessarily what we would think of as Aboriginal or native culture that you were pursuing. It was just culture, period. It could have been dance. It did not necessarily have to be Aboriginal dance. It could be music, not necessarily with an Aboriginal influence. Is that correct?
Ms. Milliken: That is an important point to bring up. I have very gifted friends in the arts, musicians and actors and writers. There are programs for artists, but if the work is not sufficiently Aboriginal in content, you are not going to get the money to make your CD. That is tragic. If there is an Aboriginal fund, why are they defining what is Aboriginal art? These are Aboriginal people creating something for us to appreciate, but we are suddenly placing parameters on their art and limiting their access to the money.
Senator Hubley: We impose our expectations of what they should be doing.
Ms. Podemski: What is the point? Is the point to put you on the platform as an Aboriginal musician with a drum, or is it to let you be an Aboriginal artist?
Senator Hubley: In the latter option, you would choose your own expression that would be unique no matter how it came about, which is how cultures evolve. You made it perfectly clear that, while it is wonderful to have Aboriginal stories, if they are not presented from an Aboriginal standpoint, then it is not the most complete story.
I wanted to touch on something else. We heard from a Ms. Jamie Gallant, from my community of Kensington, on Prince Edward Island. I point that out to illustrate that she comes from a small community. She and her family were Mikmaw, the only ones in the community. We were somewhat sheltered in that community, in that we did not understand the problems that Aboriginals have in other parts of the country. They are there, but on a smaller scale. She is now the youth and labour market intern for the Congress of Aboriginal People, and she made a presentation to us in which she talked about hope. Having listened to your presentation this morning, I can see that you have lots of hope. You have lots of great expectations for the work that you are doing.
Do you think your life would have been different had you not grown up in an urban society? Would you have still had the drive and the initiative to overcome those problems that so many of the youth experience? Obviously, you are successful. We would like to know why, so we can make certain intelligent recommendations on what we feel would be important to youth.
Ms. Podemski: We speak about this a lot. I would probably have had the same drive. I am pretty sure about it, only because I have seen mirror images of myself coming from a community 800 miles north of anything urban, people who reminded me of myself. Parents are non-existent — not that this mirrors my life, but the support system is not there for them. They are still so driven. They start the youth group. They do not drink or do drugs. They are focused. They start a dance class. They travel to conferences, raise money, watch the news and educate themselves. These are really driven kids.
I know that it is possible. I think that I might have made different choices. I have made a lot of bad choices in my life anyway. I was as ashamed of and as embarrassed by my family as it was possible to be. I think it probably would have been the same, although perhaps more difficult to access the dance and acting classes. If I think about it, I probably would have started one.
Senator Hubley: I am also a dance teacher, and my advice to all of my dancers is not to give up the dancing lessons.
Senator Christensen: As you know, this committee's study is looking at urban youth. That includes both those who have come from the reserves and those who are first, second and third generation urban dwellers, and who may be having problems like the ones you were talking about in Saskatchewan.
How do we give these kids a chance? How do we find ways of supporting them so that they will take responsibility for their own lives? Certainly, I do not think there are any illusions. There are people such as you who rise to the top because of your determination and focus. This can be found in all societies. You will make it; there is no question about that. However, you are the exception. It is that middle group that we want to try to find ways of helping — to give them the hope and the self-respect they need. There are those at the bottom who, for whatever reasons, will not succeed. That is the way of society.
Ms. Milliken, you mentioned that you have First Nations' youth in your group. Where do you find them, or do they find you?
Ms. Milliken: Often, they find us, but there is a great organization in Toronto funded by HRDC. They have a targeted wage subsidy program that enables us to hire as many as three or four trainees per year. They pay up to 75 per cent of the cost. The program works for us and for the people whom we are training. It is an excellent program. They also contribute to community programs such as RepREZentin'. Those types of funding programs are great.
Mostly, the youth come to us, and we recruit through that organization. Many kids call us from the reservations and want to move to Toronto. People learn about us from our Web site, from the work that we do and from our travels. We also put out the word that we are looking for driven, innovative youth.
Senator Christensen: What support do you receive from national and regional Aboriginal organizations?
Ms. Milliken: None. It is difficult to find support within our own community. Ms. Podemski and I have found that to be a barrier. For any of the youth to survive and rise to the top, they need more support within our own community. We went to the American Indian Film Festival, where youth from three reserves had worked hard on 10 short films. Do you think any of the adults came out to see them? Well, we were there and a couple of the stars from Atanarjuat were there. There were hardly any adult filmmakers or other role models present to view the youth programs. We see that all the time: a lack of parental support, community support and a lack of belief in the kids.
We had a script meeting in Regina with four guys who have been in and out of jail. One of them was awaiting sentence and one of them had just got out of jail. These were the hardest-working kids for the entire time that we were in Regina. They were around for everything we needed, but they were also extremely troubled. We believed in them, and we spoke their language. That is what it takes — people who can say that they understand, or, if they do not, that they will try to understand. However, those kids need to make an effort to understand us. It is a give-and-take situation. It is important to reach them on a level that they can appreciate and understand.
The Acting Chairman: I have one or two quick questions for you. You talked about the lack of support from your communities. Do friendship centres play a useful role, in your experience, as places where young people can meet? Are they meeting the cultural needs of young people?
Ms. Podemski: Yes.
Ms. Milliken: The friendship centres are very important institutions.
Ms. Podemski: They need to be recognized more. People are working hard and there are so many volunteers keeping the youth groups going. There needs to be more grassroots funding for those initiatives.
The Acting Chairman: The second question concerns the extent of the impact of urban culture on your own identity. There are some ways in which it may reinforce aspects of your identity. In other ways, it may submerge it. Can you comment on that?
Ms. Milliken: I found that I did not know what it meant to be Indian. I did not have an elder to learn from and I did not have anyone to teach me the practices of my people. That was difficult. However, I had all of the other things. I had people who taught me how to be professional; taught me the importance of education; and showed me the resources and what was possible for me as a human being, rather than just as a native. I missed that for the most part. It takes a long time to find it. It is the flip side — all of one thing and not enough of the other.
The Acting Chairman: I had the privilege last night of sitting on an Aboriginal panel at the annual Aboriginal Head Start meeting for people from the communities. The woman from Manitoulin Island was an Aboriginal. Her comment about residential schools was interesting. She said that living well is the best revenge. Do not spend all your time dwelling on the problems that put you there. The best way of putting it all behind you is to do what you are doing.
Thank you.
Ms. Milliken: RepREZentin' in Regina, which is Moccasin Flats in the series, has been accepted by the Sundance Film Festival. We will take a group of these kids from inner-city Regina to that festival. It is a big honour for us.
The committee adjourned.