National Indigenous leaders say it isn’t good enough to just take Conservative Sen. Lynn Beyak off of Senate committees — she needs to be removed from office.

Two northern Ontario First Nations grand chiefs who represent more than 70 Indigenous communities first asked for Beyak’s resignation in March after she made comments defending the residential school system in Canada that saw more than 150,000 Indigenous kids taken from their homes and culture and placed into church run, government funded schools. Beyak said that an “abundance of good” had come from the schools and “mistakes” should not “overshadow” the “good things” that happened.

The schools represent a dark chapter in Canada’s recent past. The schools ran from the mid-1800s to the 1990s. Many of the students suffered various forms of neglect and abuse and generations have suffered trauma as a result.

Beyak was a member of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples at the time she made the comments in March. Afterwards, former Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose removed her from that committee.

Earlier this month, Beyak posted on her website that First Nations people should become Canadian citizens and trade in their status cards and further to that — they should promote their culture “on their own dime, on their own time,” according to the CBC. That open letter has since been removed. (Status Indians are Canadian citizens.)

Grand Council Treaty #3 Ogichidaa Francis Kavanaugh said it is unacceptable Beyak, who hails from the Dryden area, sits in the Senate and represents his territory when she has such abhorrent views.

“As a senator who has resided within the Treaty #3 territory, I am gravely concerned about your lack of understanding. You continue to speak about something you clearly know nothing about,” Kavanaugh said in an open statement.

There were 17 Indian residential schools in Ontario. The Dryden, Kenora, Fort Frances area was surrounded by nine schools.

Kavanaugh said Treaty #3 leaders will “continue to monitor” Beyak’s work and “will make concentrated efforts” to ensure that she does not do any further harm by perpetuating “ignorance and racism towards Indigenous peoples,” he said. Grand Council Treaty #3 territory comprises 28 communities and it runs from west of Thunder Bay to north of Sioux Lookout, along the U.S. border, to the province of Manitoba.

Earlier this week, Beyak was removed from all Senate committees; however, she is still a member of the Conservative caucus. Beyak, who was appointed by former prime minister Stephen Harper in January 2013, could not be reached for comment.

In this era of reconciliation, there is no place for outdated thinking like Beyak’s in the Senate, said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde in a statement released this week. Last March, Bellegarde reached out to Beyak. He wrote her a letter opposing her remarks, and he sent her a book on residential schools by John Milloy entitled, “A National Crime.” Beyak never responded.

Also this week, Carolyn Bennett, the minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, called Beyak’s continued comments regarding Indigenous people “ill-informed, hurtful, and simply wrong.”

NAN Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, who represents 49 communities in northern Ontario, said they have “renewed” their call for her to resign and for the Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer to remove her from caucus. “We feel she should not be given any type of platform to espouse her racist views,” Fiddler said.

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“The other thing that is bothersome is that the survivors themselves reached out to her. They met with her in July in Sioux Lookout. And for her to turn around and say these racist views after spending time with survivors is shameful,” he added. Sioux Lookout has a truth and reconciliation committee and they met with the senator in July.

Survivors left that meeting thinking she was going to re-examine her attitudes and have no more distorted views, said Kavanaugh. “Then she comes up with these recent comments. She hasn’t learned a thing,” he said.