In terms of my life, the message would probably be that we have the knowledge, the history, we have the connection to this land. We know that. We have all the good human resources that could help us to generate or struggle or fight to bring about the possibility to have our voices heard. We have the knowledge, we have the history, we have the connection to the land, we have all of these elements. What is lacking in my view is that we have no financial resources to struggle or mount a comeback or fight with the government. We don’t have that because you can see we are poor. So all those rights are extinguished, resources are taken away without our consent.

I am hurt and sad, very sad, of what happened to my people, my community, especially when I think of how my parents lived freely on this land. They had self-rule, they controlled very much their lives and there was a lot of respect, but nowadays you have all these aboriginal communities around here in our neighbouring nations, they signed their own deals, their own settlements, their own agreements and at the end they want to force this community to follow this path, make the same choice as a group, to sign away our rights and by doing so the government succeeds in extinguishing our rights, our culture, our way of life, our Indianity, and then they succeed in covering up all of who we are as a people, as a culture, as a distinct group so that they can forget forever about the culture, the Indian people that lived here.

The government is so evil that they plan to force us to sign away our rights by having other communities sign on our behalf. That’s what they do. They just wave the money in front of our nose. They let us smell the money, they let us see the colour of money and then they say, ‘You guys, you don’t want to sign away your rights? OK, fine. We don’t need you anyway. We’ll ask the neighbouring communities to sign away your rights,’ and that’s really bad that they can do that.

Our parents were there and recent history tells us that we were there first when the mines came, when the missionaries came over here, when they started to build runways, the train. It was the Innu who led them, working for prospectors, explorers, mining surveyors.