From suffering to healing ?

Canadian governments, after taking land from aboriginals and forcing them to live on reserves, have consistently stonewalled on treaty obligations.

From suffering to healing
How to repair damage to aboriginal communities
Mark Tremblay, Canwest News Service

Published: Sunday, September 14, 2008

Where the Pavement Ends

By Marie Wadden

Douglas & McIntyre, $36.95

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper listens as Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, speaks in the House of Commons on June 11 this year, the day that Canada formally apologized for residential-school abuses.

Chris Wattie, Reuters

The treatment of First Nations in this country has been a crime, and all non-aboriginal Canadians have inherited responsibility for this shameful legacy.

But acknowledging collective guilt, while an important first step, isn't sufficient. The real challenge remains how to make aboriginal communities whole again after so much has been done to tear them apart.

That's why Marie Wadden's Where the Pavement Ends is such an important book, particularly now, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins its five-year, cross- country series of hearings.

The commission received its funding as part of the residential-school-abuse settlement, and its hearings will try to "educate Canadians about the damage done to generations of aboriginal people as a result of this heinous government policy," Wadden writes.

From 1920 to 1996, aboriginal children across the country were, by law, routinely taken from their homes and communities and forced to attend schools often hundreds of miles away. Thousands of former students have testified to the physical and sexual abuse they suffered at these schools.

"Residential schools also robbed them of normal family life and of their native languages and cultural traditions. The result, for many, has been a lifetime of addiction and mental health problems," Wadden writes. (Aboriginal alcohol addiction and suicide rates are both estimated to be five or six times the Canadian average.)

Canadian churches and the federal government recently paid billions to settle lawsuits that aboriginal groups filed over all this.

But residential schools are hardly the only indignity aboriginals have suffered. Wadden, a CBC-Radio producer based in St. John's, recounts how Canadian governments, after taking land from aboriginals and forcing them to live on reserves, have consistently stonewalled on treaty obligations.

The latest example, she reminds us, is how cavalierly Stephen Harper's government has rejected the Kelowna Accord -- a deal negotiated between aboriginal leaders, the federal government, the territories and the provinces.

Wadden describes the psychological wounds perpetrated on aboriginals, making it much easier to understand their high rates of addiction, fetal alcohol syndrome, domestic violence and suicide today.

Many observers have commented on the plight of aboriginals and despaired over the immensity and seeming intractability of the problems they face.

But Wadden's primary purpose is not to despair -- it's to advocate ways to make things better, and this is why her book is particularly valuable. She chronicles some of the more interesting initiatives aboriginal communities have used to try to heal themselves.

The author has particular admiration for the non-profit Four Worlds Centre for Development Learning, which has gained much trust in aboriginal communities. She holds out their process for community development and healing as an important template that the federal government should be studying closely.

Common to the Four Worlds approach and to virtually all of the successful examples she cites is a "vision of grassroots community development, which encompasses social healing."

This is a necessary first step because without it, any attempt to kickstart aboriginal independence and self-sufficiency is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Wadden writes that many government programs and agencies fail because they are too top-down in their approach, never involving the whole community in the decision-making process.

"Community development, if done correctly, will create the conditions necessary for change: hope, jobs, higher educational achievement, greater self-esteem and a reduction in addictive behaviour -- partly by dismantling denial, since addressing addiction will be a key part of the process," Wadden writes.

The book is not a simplistic call to throw more money at the problem. The process Wadden recommends doesn't have to cost any more than Canadian taxpayers currently are shelling out, "because money can be saved elsewhere -- for example, by eliminating the ineffective programs that exist now ... and the high-salaried positions that go with them."

Wadden doesn't suggest that there's an easy fix. But her concluding chapter -- with recommendations and a 12-step action plan -- seems both reasonable and achievable. Her triumph is in making hope seem viable.

Where The Pavement Ends is not an entertaining or easy read. But for the sake of our country's collective soul, here's hoping it becomes a bestseller.