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The reporter had asked the speakers how they felt about Trudeau’s record on indigenous issues. In response, one of the speakers began to talk about a young indigenous person who had died in Thunder Bay.

“But how can he be blamed for that? You don’t think that anything he’s doing is helping the situation? Is he an improvement over Stephen Harper? Talk about his record,” the reporter said.

“Excuse me? Did I just hear you correctly?” said speaker Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail. “How can he be blamed for that?”

Their anger escalated quickly after the reporter asked them to answer her question. “We don’t want you here. Can you please leave?” said elder Sophie McKeown from Moose Cree First Nation.

After the reporter refused to leave and another reporter from CTV asked a similar question, Wabano-Iahtail accused the reporters in the room of showing their “white privilege” and “white fragility,” and eventually ended the news conference.

“You can’t take our truth,” she said. “Look how many people came to bat for you, white lady. And you’re a guest here. Without us, you’d be homeless. This is over.”

Photo by Tony Caldwell/Postmedia News

The exchange occurred after a tense night during which nine people were detained and then released for trying to erect a teepee on Parliament Hill without a permit.

Eventually, in the early hours of Thursday morning, the demonstrators were permitted to put up the teepee just inside the Parliament Hill gates, near the East Block.

During the news conference Thursday morning, the speakers said they were not satisfied with the compromise.