Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 6 - Evidence - May 14, 2014
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 6:53 p.m. to study the challenges relating to First Nations infrastructure on reserves.
[Translation]
Marcy Zlotnick, Clerk of the Committee: Honourable senators, the chair of the committee is unfortunately unable to attend tonight's meeting. As the clerk of the committee, it is therefore my duty to preside over the election of an acting chair.
[English]
I am ready to receive a motion for the election of an acting chair. Are there any nominations?
Senator Wallace: I would nominate Senator Scott Tannas as our acting chair for tonight's proceedings.
Ms. Zlotnick: Are there any other nominations?
It is moved by the Honourable Senator Wallace that the Honourable Senator Tannas take the chair of this committee. Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
Ms. Zlotnick: I declare the motion carried.
Senator Scott Tannas (Acting Chair) in the chair
The Acting Chair: Good evening. I would like to welcome all honourable senators and members of the public who are watching this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples either here in the room or via CPAC or the Web. I'm Scott Tannas from Alberta and I'm pleased to chair this meeting this evening on behalf of Senators Patterson and Dyck.
The mandate of this committee is to examine legislation and matters relating to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada generally. This evening we are hearing testimony on a specific order of reference authorizing us to examine and report on the challenges and potential solutions relating to infrastructure on reserves including housing, community infrastructure and innovative opportunities for financing and more effective collaborative strategies.
Today we will hear from Douglas Cardinal, an architect whose many works, including the Museum of Civilization, are well-known to committee members and to Canadians generally. Mr. Cardinal has been appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, has received a Gold Medal in Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute in Canada and has been declared "World Master of Contemporary Architecture" as a professor and academic by the International Association of Architects.
Before proceeding to the testimony, I would like to go around the table and ask members of the committee to introduce themselves.
Senator Moore: Wilfred Moore from Nova Scotia.
Senator Wallace: Senator John Wallace from New Brunswick.
Senator Raine: Senator Nancy Greene Raine, British Columbia.
Senator Meredith: Don Meredith, Ontario.
The Acting Chair: Members of the committee, please help me in welcoming our witness, Douglas Cardinal.
We look forward to your presentation, which will be followed by questions from the senators. The floor is yours.
Douglas Cardinal, Architect, as an individual: Thank you very much for inviting me here. I would like to share with you my experiences in serving First Nations communities in the last 50 years not only in Canada, but also in the United States.
I found that the major issue in the communities is a lack of listening to and respecting the people of the First Nations and very little consultation in developing various programs and systems, which don't grow from the people themselves but are in a sense designed and developed outside the community and pushed on the people as solutions that would be best for them. I think that lack of respect and real understanding of the First Nations communities is the reason for their dire situation.
I'm involved in assisting and developing health care facilities now, one in Toronto, and they advised me in their research that the average lifespan for First Nations people is 37 years. I was reminded by the minister in Alberta, when I first started serving First Nations in the communities at his request, that the average lifespan for First Nations then in the 1960s was 34 years. At that time, the average education was 3.4 years, and 75 per cent of the people were destitute and poverty stricken.
There is still a tremendous amount of poverty in the communities, and it's not because of the people's doing at all. It is primarily a government policy. This always concerned me because I believe, particularly most of the First Nations who are Naskapi people, had a culture of giving and sharing, and a culture of welcoming and sharing their lands with the people that have come here. But in that process they have been pushed aside and marginalized.
My first concern, when I was serving the 52 chiefs of Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s, was a proper education. But it can't be an education of assimilation at all because the people will never buy assimilation. In a sense, they developed a culture for thousands of years — one of living in harmony with the land and each other, a love and respect with the land and a symbiotic relationship with nature — and through that whole culture and perspective of living, they have survived for thousands of years on this land. The things that they see from the dominant culture, they have been taught that that is the wrong way to live. That means when you destroy your host, the earth, and pollute the environment and rivers and cut the trees, forests and everything else, then you are creating a risk not only for all your environment but creating a risk for yourself.
The vision of the First Nations educational program, which was presented to Prime Minister Trudeau at the time and then-Minister Chrétien of Indian Affairs, was that their culture had to be in many ways, as some of the people in South America told me, the drum in one hand and the computer in the other. It had to be a teaching of the best of both cultures because they have a contribution to make and that contribution is, as they say, according to the seven fires prophecy, of which this is the seventh prophecy, that they have to teach the immigrant cultures who share their land to love the land as they love the land, to love the clear waters and the mountain streams, to love the earth as they love the earth, to love the winds that blow across their brow, to teach the immigrant culture to love as they love because they have been there for thousands of years and this new culture is here just a short time.
So they feel that their destiny is to teach the immigrant culture to love as they love for their very survival because we cannot survive as peoples on this land if we continue the destructive path we are on.
There is no way that they will buy this approach to their environment because it is against their very teachings and the core of their culture and against the teachings of their ancestors. That, I believe, should be respected.
In a sense, they want an educational program that teaches both world views, their world view of love, honour and respect for each other and the environment and also the hierarchical world view, which is imposed on them, of power and control, which is usually the church and state, as far as they are concerned.
I feel that one of the great things in Canada is our diversity, and the opportunity for First Nations to take their rightful role in providing their knowledge and wisdom to the human family is vital. I've recently been invited to China where the vice minister of ethnicities and minorities wants to preserve their indigenous cultures and asked me to be a part of it. Why he said they want to preserve their indigenous cultures is because in developing the world view of looking at nature as a resource, they are choking in their own pollution in Beijing. They want to get back to their roots where they feel a sense of affinity to the land and affinity to the environment, and they feel their indigenous people will be an important contribution in the future of their country, which is quite a change for their government.
Then that made me feel, my goodness, the people in China have seen that that is a great resource for them, and I believe there are a lot of people in Canada that feel that the indigenous people are a great resource for our country. Why, we could all be partners working together. I feel that's fundamental and most important.
Now in the housing in the communities, nothing works because it's planned outside. It's planned by engineers who developed communities around sewage systems. The people feel that human beings should have a community planned around the way they live, around their extended families, around the way they communicate with each other, planning around their culture, and that it should be planned around their heart, not their anuses. So the first thing is that the whole planning system of all the engineering of these communities has been enslaved by the very systems that are supposed to support the people. The whole community is planned in a way to frustrate the way that the people are living. Most of the engineering systems provided in these communities are actually opposing their own cultures.
Some communities that move to new communities that have been planned, supposedly planned by the whole system of engineering and planning that we accept, are total failures and cause the people tremendous stress. Even the way the housing is planned, like on a list: Okay, now you're on this list, so you get to have this house, and that house, and this house, and that house.
When you go up North, people have extended families, but the extended families are all pulled apart because of the process of who should be on the list for the next house. And when you go up North, you can't get any sleep because people are running their Ski-Doos all night trying to connect with each other because they're fighting the whole community that they're housed in. It's not working for the people.
The people have always lived in groups and shared everything with the group. As hunters and gatherers before 10,000 years ago, we all did that. We survived by sharing and caring for each other, and sharing all resources with each other. That's how we survived.
The last 10,000 years when we decided to go to agriculture and treated the earth as a commodity and started defending territories, we established those patriarchal cultures which are all about power and control, which are adversarial and warlike. And for the past 10,000 years, we have been killing each other with our destructive wars created by our patriarchal systems.
When my mother was a girl, she was a non-person. Women had no rights; they were commodities.
First Nations women were always respected as the centre of the family. They had the power. We have a patriarchal system imposing itself on a matriarchal one, and we wonder why the women are abused. It took 500 years to turn Europe from a patriarchal system to a matriarchal system, and they had to burn all the powerful women at the stake to do it.
We have two cultures, and when I was in China, I visited a matriarchal culture there. They had similar problems, but now they are supported to retain their own culture, language and heritage.
Does the housing work? No. Do these modular houses work that work for the people here? I don't think they even work for the people here. One of my architects is from Italy, and he says, "I hate these subdivisions. There is no way they separate each other. We can't get together with our own friends, our people; they are designed to separate people from each other." I think that the whole design of communities should be designed to connect people together, and that is not what we're planning.
Now the other thing that I've noted when I'm working with First Nations is the way they plan. I have never learned so much from the First Nations. They know about land use planning because they plan not only for people — and they know the inventory of all their resources — but also for all their life givers for seven generations. I have worked with communities and I have helped them plan their communities in the traditional way. Did I ever learn about planning. What we are doing is we are not planning. We are planning for people, but when we have nothing left to eat but each other, this not planning.
For the people of the Far North that are more isolated, it is amazing how they plan. They plan for the harvesting. In one community, they have 200 celebrations every year during which they harvest a particular species and they only take so that there is plenty for the next generation. Developing a planning method with them was, to me, very inspirational.
The only way I was able to get support for this method of planning — and I was looking for all professionals — was when I found a Buddhist in Japan who understood this method of planning. He was on the team, of course.
If we listen to the people, and I have, beautiful things can come out of that. We can provide an educational facility that is about caring and love for the children. We can develop a community that respects women and children. Our cities are not planned for women and children. They are all planned by men. Our whole industry is a symphony of phallic symbols. They're all about men.
What a contribution First Nations would make if people listened to them — not only in the planning of their facilities but also in the planning of their resources. In the communities that I developed — for example, in the community of Oujé-Bougoumou, I won a United Nations award for designing a village of the future — I listened to them totally. I sat down with the elders and I said, "Tell me about your vision for the community," and they gave me the vision for the community. I went back to my office with this vision and I drew it all up. I presented it to the community and 500 people were there. I said to them, "You have to understand one thing: What I am presenting to you is my interpretation of your needs. It is going through my cultural filter, coming out my hand and it is my interpretation. What the heck do I know about the James Bay Cree? Unless you change this totally and become totally involved in this planning process, you will get another colonial act from me, and I don't want that to happen to you."
So they were reticent. They said, "We only have a Grade 3 education." I said, "Hey, universities don't give out brains or degrees in common sense. How about totally enrolling yourselves in this process?" When they felt secure that I would listen to them, they were like piranha; they tore me to shreds. I listened to every one of their issues with feedback. I listened to every one of them because I had new data and information. Sometimes people don't know what they want, but they know what they don't want and that is valuable information.
The process involved me listening to the people. They gave me their input. Then I went back to the office, tore back the scheme, redrew another one and presented it to them. They felt even more at home and said, "That is okay for the elders, but we middle age people will have to look after the elders and the young people," and they tore at me. We went through seven reiterations until I went there one day and presented it. The people and the kids got up. They put their hands all over the models and looked at it for a long time. Then the chief said, "Okay, he wants your input." People said nothing. The chief said, "Well, Doug, you finally have it." People stood up and said, "That's our community."
They built it. The Cree construction company built it using their own forces. They received that award from the United Nations. Also, they presented their work in Hanover, Germany, at Expo 2000. That is a model community because it was done by the people themselves.
When I took the minister there, it had landscaping, lawns and Cree signs everywhere. That can happen. People are less frustrated and they have fewer problems with drugs and alcohol. They don't have to self-medicate themselves because they have so much pain created by the imposition of a system that just goes against their very grain.
Regarding the housing design itself, the family layout, if you put a three bedroom bungalow up there, partitions don't work. They don't like partitions; they are used to being together in a space. Sometimes they take an axe to all the interior partitions; it helps make firewood. Then people say, "You don't even respect your houses." Well, perhaps the housing doesn't respect their culture. It has to start from the house itself.
I remember going up North with a bunch of elders. We sat on a chalkboard and we designed a house that would work for the North. I tried to implement it through our government systems, but it was totally unacceptable because it didn't follow the particular guidelines.
The educational system does not respect their language and culture or the way they want to teach. When I went to Bolivia, they wanted me to help them design a university. They wanted to create a non-hierarchical system. They wanted all the classrooms to be round so it wouldn't create a hierarchy because people don't operate under hierarchies; they operate by consensus. They operate cooperatively because that is what they were taught by the power of women.
This is the issue: None of the housing works, none of the programs work, and none of the planning for the communities work. You pour millions of dollars into those communities and the people don't have a say.
Over the last few years I was involved in developing the first school to create a precedent around the Indian culture and around the programs that people wanted. I developed the first school, the first planning, the First Nations University, the first community planning from an Indian perspective and the first community planning. Last year, we opened the Cree Cultural Centre, which was to preserve their language and culture and share their teachings and knowledge with everyone.
If you really and truly design a community around the Indian culture — and they found that in China — it is a tourist attraction. Even Oujé-Bougoumou makes $1 million or $2 million a year in tourism because people want to know what a Native community is like. There are very few in Canada. They are all poor White slums. What about an Indian community where the people can take pride in how they live and how they function and what their contribution can be? It is the policy of the government to put the First Nations in a position of taking with their hand out, which is totally contrary and humiliating to a culture of giving.
My feeling is that to respect the people, you have to see them as a culture of giving and also see them as people with a tremendous amount to give and share with the rest of our fellow Canadians.
I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Cardinal. There is a lot to think about and to talk about.
Maybe, senators, as you are thinking about your questions, I will just ask one.
You said that it was in 2000, or thereabouts, that Oujé-Bougoumou came to be. As you look back, 15 years later, and think about some of the modern technologies that have come, are there things that have been developed that make it easier to make that community happen elsewhere now? Would it be easier to do that and more cost-effective today than it was then, or have things pretty much stayed the same?
Mr. Cardinal: I think there has been a real development of technology in sewage systems, water systems and heating for the village. For example, in that village there are mills around it that produce a lot of sawdust and waste. We had some Swedish engineers assist us and help us to develop a central system that would employ people to collect the sawdust and then take it to this wood-fired boiler that heats the whole village, in a way that produces very little pollution. We're using a waste product there to supply power to the whole village, hot water to every household and hot water heat, which is a tremendous saving to the community, because it costs so much money to heat the community with oil. There are a lot of innovations like that that we should look into.
With all due respect, none of these innovations could happen through the structure of Indian Affairs. We were able to develop the community of Oujé-Bougoumou outside the framework of the department. We created a separate corporation and put some well-meaning folks on the board as well as the local people, open book, and they managed the progress and design of the community. We did it more economically, meeting our budgets and schedules much better than we could under the huge bureaucracy of the department.
It again taught the people to manage their own resources and affairs. When the people were building the buildings themselves, they were trained in how to maintain them in the future. We did it so efficiently that we actually were able to do it under budget. So we took the money that we saved and put it in a separate housing fund and developed a program where people would be able to own their own homes by paying into that fund. If people own their own homes, they will look after them more and treat them with much more respect.
In the program of owning their own homes, a certain portion of their income for that went into this housing fund, which developed a fund that would be able to build more houses. It was a way to be able to use their own resources with a lot. It worked both ways because the people owned their own home. They developed their own pride in their community and it then had a local fund that built more houses for the people.
The Acting Chair: Thank you for that.
We are now hearing echoes of some of the things you described. Some of the innovations and some of the things that you and your folks pioneered are happening in small ways in other places. I thought you would be encouraged to hear that.
Certainly, we are here with what we know is a very important study with a long way to go, but there is some hope.
Let us go to questions.
Senator Meredith: Mr. Cardinal, thank you so much for your enlightening presentation. I could have sat here all night and listened to you, but we have to have you answer some questions for us tonight.
I want to thank you for your contribution to Canada and for the work that you have done coming through and facing racism within this country and having been able to overcome that.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your contribution and for your continued work going forward in this country and now, by extension, around the globe.
You talked about planning around the community and the fact that the culture is not being respected; the people are not being listened to; there is no consultation. What has been the feedback from those to whom you have offered your sage advice over the last 50 years working with communities? As you referred to in the last part of your remarks tonight, these slum communities that exist in First Nation communities, why have these people not listened to your advice about the model communities that you have been able to help create?
Mr. Cardinal: I think it is a problem because we have racism about First Nations built into our whole culture here in Canada. Even having a Department of Indian Affairs means that the people can't handle their own affairs; somebody else has to handle their affairs. You don't get a department of any other culture. We have so many different peoples from around the world. It is our history.
John A. Macdonald developed a program to kill the Indian in the child with the residential school system, and that was destructive. Forty per cent of the children died in those residential schools, and the rest have been damaged forever.
So we have that history to overcome, but that's history. Knowing that kind of history, it should be our responsibility, in our generation, to turn it around because you can't dwell on the past. You have to look at the present. Particularly when you look at the young faces of the children, you can't think about the past. You have to forgive the past, forgive what happened and move on to the future.
I feel that this is a good time because the government has made an apology to the First Nations, and I see that many people have been given hope from that gesture. I think that that is a step forward, and I feel it's a great time now, particularly when we have so many people from other countries that all have experienced, in their own countries — that's why they're here — racism and war and strife. They have a real feeling and opportunity to assist First Nations to take their rightful place in the human family as partners in Canada. I feel that is what should be happening in the future. There's the very fact that we have this meeting tonight, and we can talk about it. Before, we couldn't even talk about it. First Nations people were invisible. Even in the work on the Museum of Civilization and changing it to the Museum of History, Mark O'Neill is committed to starting history not from contact, which it was 25 years ago when I was working on it, but from the last ice age. So that includes our indigenous history as part of Canadian history.
So I think that the people have no knowledge of our history, and that's a problem. It's not taught in our history books or anything else. They have no knowledge of our culture and no knowledge of our contribution, and I think it begins by creating a better understanding between First Nations. From my experience, I feel that I would never give up my First Nations heritage to adopt a Western perspective, even if I am an architect who is trained in Western vernacular. In my heart, I'll still follow my father's culture. There is no way that one could take and kill the Indian in me without killing me.
I think, in a sense, society changes, thank heavens. I just see that we've got to change the whole relationship that we have with First Nations and what we do as a patriarchal society. Go and talk to the patriarchal society we created on the reserves and chief and council. Those are colonial systems that have no relationship to the communities because the House of Representatives for indigenous people was all women, the clan mothers, and the Senate was both men and woman elders. The executive branch was men because men like doing stuff, but they have to be directed by the women to make sure that what they do is in the interests of the future generation, the children.
That is the Great Law. The American Constitution was based on the Great Law. It was taken from our people, but they had a patriarchal twist to it. So they made the House of Representatives all men because women were non-persons at the time. Coming into communities where guys are just talking with other guys doesn't work because in our communities you have to talk to the women.
When I go to the communities and work with them, I talk to the women and to the elders because they are the ones who have the burden of raising their children, who have the highest rate of suicide. Young kids of 13, 14 committing suicide, sometimes whole packs of kids, see no future, and that is so sad. I'm asked to go to many communities, and when I go there, unfortunately I feel very sad to see what is happening in the communities. It's still happening.
Senator Meredith: Talk to us about the model community you created and why that has not been replicated across other First Nations communities.
Mr. Cardinal: I was at a function of senior members of the Department of Indian Affairs one time, and they were all talking. They did not know who I was; I was just part of this party in Ottawa. They regarded Oujé-Bougoumou as the community that got away from them, and it was a very bad precedent for the department. From my experience, even in education, even though the minister approved Indian control of Indian education, there is no way the department is going to implement it. There was a woman, Teresa Gadwa, in Kehewin, in Alberta. She said, "You men have failed us," so the women took over. They asked me to design them a school that would work for the children. I took the Honourable Jean Chrétien's word and designed a school around the children. It was against the department's wishes. In a sense, even the political organizations were all told not to have that school presented to the minister because they were financed by the department, and they would lose all of their financing if that school was presented to the minister and approved. All of the leaders, even in Alberta, were told that they would get all their funds cut if they supported the school. So I had to go to Saskatchewan, where the chief always had meetings with the Honourable Jean Chrétien, and he put it on the agenda. It got to the minister, who approved it.
There is such resistance by the department to changing this colonial system that it stands in the way of any kind of progress. But I felt, "You can't take on the whole system," so I thought what I'd do is work with the community and make precedents. When we did the first school, the other community said, "Well, they have a school, we can do that." It created a precedent.
Senator Moore: The James Bay Project, when did you do that? When was Oujé-Bougoumou designed and built?
Mr. Cardinal: Oujé-Bougoumou, around 2000.
Senator Moore: Have you gone back, and does it work for the people and is it what you thought you were going to end up with?
Mr. Cardinal: Yes, it worked beautifully for the people. They were not part of the James Bay agreement, and even their own people turned their backs on them. They were just abandoned on a lake, and they had just tar paper shacks and nobody would recognize them.
Anyway, yes, the community they built works. They have jobs. They run their own affairs, their own community. They are an economic force in the area. They have tourism from Germany and Japan, and people want to know what it's like to go out in nature and come back and eat beaver in a traditional aschiiukamikw, which people from Europe love. That gives them a sense of pride in who they are and what they have to contribute.
So, yes, they have more jobs and more opportunities and fewer problems with alcoholism. Their language is coming back; the school teaches Cree and French and English. They're trilingual children, and they have a better rate in entering university level than the average Canadian. It is an extremely successful community. The James Bay Cree decided to have their culture centre built there, which we opened last year, and it's a hub of activity.
Senator Moore: Have other First Nations come to you and asked you to do a similar job for them and work with them, and if so, have you gone to the department and what has been the result?
Mr. Cardinal: Well, some of the communities have, and they were told that if they worked with me the department would cut off all their funds including their welfare.
Senator Meredith: How recent has this been in terms of the time?
Mr. Cardinal: That was a while back. I'm trying to get a school for the Algonquins now in Winneway. We had a contract to build a school for them following the way they want to teach, for some $6 million, and we were able to meet the budget and schedule using innovative materials like cross-laminated timber that was grown and manufactured in the North, which would be an ideal product for the North, and strong enough that you could take an axe to it and it would still survive.
We built a school out of that, and then the department decided that that was too good for the community and they wanted a typical Indian Affairs box, because we designed it around the needs of the community where all the classrooms were eight-sided so they could teach the children in a non-hierarchical world view. We were told by the department that they changed the budget from $6 million to $4 million, and that a $6 million school in that community was only half the kind of facility that any other group from Ontario would have for their facilities, and they wanted to cut it down to $4 million. So the project was delayed.
But then there was a new director general of the Quebec department. I met with him a month ago and talked to him about the project. I presented the whole thing to him, and he said, "Yes, let's proceed; I'd like to have it built and put out for tender on my birthday." So that's a whole different change of attitude. So now we're doing our best to get it out for tender on his birthday.
But it's the kind of thing where why should the people be penalized because they want to do something worthwhile for their children? And, yes, I've established these precedents through the years, including the First Nations University, which was against the wishes of the people within the Indian Affairs department.
Those precedents we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to serve the people. That's what democracy is all about. But in Canada, within our democracy, we have a communist system run by Indian Affairs. It's like Russia in Canada. I mean Russia the way it was when I went through Checkpoint Charlie and saw what was happening under Moscow. The East Bloc was a huge Department of Indian Affairs, as far as I was concerned, and you know where that goes.
Senator Raine: Thank you for sharing all of this.
We know that the population is expanding very rapidly on First Nations communities, and from what you're saying we're going about it all the wrong way, making small homes and cramming people in them. Do you think there is any way that we can have a change of mind so that the financing of housing on reserves wouldn't be allocated small homes per family, but bigger homes for family groupings? Are there any designs?
It is so hard because there is no imagination in the bureaucrats to think outside the box, but here we have people in boxes, and they don't want to be in boxes. In today's technology, have you thought about a multi-generational home?
Mr. Cardinal: Yes, that would make all sorts of sense. It goes against the whole system that's in place. It doesn't fit the guidelines. It's not in the book.
It reminds me of the Egyptian hierarchy. For 7,000 years they drew a human being one way, this way and that way. Bureaucrats don't change; they just stay in place, because the department does not have to be accountable to its constituency, the Indian people, because they are dictators to the Indian people. That is the issue.
Yes, and the women planned their housing, and I have been involved in that planning. We planned in clusters and shared facilities, like they always share the cooking and the bringing up of children.
I planned a whole community. We got so far, and the women said, "Okay, you guys did a fairly good job so far, but this is how we want to plan it." They planned the whole community in clusters where the children were in the centre and the women were around the children in a circle. It was like a circular series of clusters.
Now why they wanted it that way, the single mothers said — and there are a lot of single mothers — "Oh, we want to be part of that circle because we can get support and help from the other women in the raising of our children. We could get help because one mother could look after all the children while we could do some other functions as well. We could share in the raising of the children. We can share also in the cooking and whatever. We could work together."
It's now planned by a bunch of guys who want to control women. They plan to separate all the women from each other so they can control them; so then all the women have children that are driving them crazy in the houses. Because children are social creatures, they want to get together; so that doesn't work for anybody.
What they wanted to do was put the children in the centre and put the women around that and put the vehicles around that, because we have to put the mother between the vehicle and the child, and plan the whole community that way, in clusters, sharing a lot of facilities.
Why should everybody have a fridge and a stove? Why are we duplicating all these facilities when they want to share the facilities? They are a culture of sharing. They want to live like that. That's much more economical and much more useful and uses less resources and less infrastructure.
They have all these ideas of what they want, and I ended up by planning all of this stuff for them. It could never get approved by the department.
Senator Raine: We have an independent committee of the Senate here, and we are doing a study on housing.
Mr. Cardinal: Whoever said this: It takes a village to raise a child? What kind of village is going to raise that child? It has to be a village that respects the child. Then people said, "This is how we want to plan it, Doug. Has anybody else done this?" I thought, "Yes, that's how old London was designed." It wasn't designed in a series of circles, but it was designed in a series of squares where the houses were arranged with a garden in the centre and all the gardens were interconnected with each other. That is how old London and old Philadelphia are done.
I said, "Yes, a lot of people who were interested in raising families and working together and sharing, they planned their communities that way; you're not any different than anybody else in that sense."
This whole North American thing of having our own space and a big fence between our neighbours and this is mine and this is yours, it's like a bunch of little dogs developing territory around their ways. It's so patriarchal, but that's not where the people are coming from. They want to raise families; they want to bring people together; they want to share the love and devotion that they have together as groups; and they want to relate to other groups. That's how they survived for a million years on this land.
Senator Raine: In your design for the First Nation University, did you do dormitories in that style?
Mr. Cardinal: We have an overall master plan where we had dormitories and everything else in the First Nations University, but what happened in the First Nations University — this is an example. Of course, we got outside funding to start it because nobody in the department would support it. So we designed the whole master plan and everything, supported by the university, and then we had approval of all the government ministers. They were working hard to have this approved. The department would not agree; they found every way to delay the project. They dug in their heels. We tendered it, and they were supposed to come up with answers. In 30, 60, 90 days, the contractor, PCL, held on, and then the costs were such that we couldn't build it without additional money.
The department said, "Yes, we will approve it and provide additional money to the project if you lease the top floor to our department and put the president and everything else of the First Nations University in the basement."
And so in the First Nations University, the top floor is the Department of Indian Affairs; so everybody has to come through the First Nations University to be served by the department on the upper floor because they are kings of the Indian people and they belong on the top floor, and the president of the university belongs in the basement.
And then they meddled so much with the university program that it almost got cancelled. And they meddled with the chiefs, who were all part of the colonial system that we created with chief and council, so much so that they didn't spend the funds properly. They almost dumped the project, which was a vision of people for years. So the elders and the students had to come in and fire all the chiefs and hire new people in spite of the department's games.
The Acting Chair: Mr. Cardinal, we have run out of questions. On behalf of everybody here, I want to say thank you. You've given us tremendous insight into areas we weren't expecting, and you've given us fabulous insights into areas where you are world-renowned.
It's been inspirational. Your comments have been thoughtful and provocative at times, and that's wonderful and we welcome that. We thank you very much for spending time with us this evening.
Mr. Cardinal: I thank you. I apologize if I offended anybody in Indian Affairs. That's not what I like to do. I want to look at everything positively, but I just felt I should share with you. I hope that I didn't offend anybody in the process. If so, I'm very sorry.
The Acting Chair: It's a history lesson, in part, what you've given us. Everybody is very committed to looking forward. I'm looking forward to hearing about the Quebec director general's birthday and how that turns out for you, sir. Keep in touch with us.
(The committee adjourned.)