Maggie Hodgson - Speaking My Truth

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is made up of water. Our tears are water. Tom Badger, an Elder from Beaver Lake, said, “Rain cleanses the earth and our tears cleanse our souls.” 5 Water spirit is a gift we use when we cry. In residential school, many people learned not to cry. When children cried in residential school and there was no response except, “I’ll give you something to cry for!” they learned to shut down sadness. Over time, they built such a wall around their sadness that when they cry now, they say, “I broke down.” When children cried themselves to sleep because they missed their parents so much, they eventually learned they could cry all they wanted but they were still not going home. This is one of the roots of poor mental health. The sense of abandonment was experienced by many children. They wondered why their parents did not come to visit them. After one hundred years, there was not much water spirit left; in its place was hopelessness, a deep sense of abandonment, and anger. This proved to be fertilizer for suicide and addictions. In the mid-1800s, French sociologist Emile Durkheim spoke about the result of attempts to replace the values and beliefs of one group of people with those of another. 6 When those attempts are unsuccessful, the result is anomie, a sense of hopelessness and alienation from traditional values and beliefs that can result in social problems such as addictions and suicide. A recent publication, Suicide Among Aboriginal People in Canada, notes that Durkheim’s theory “still provides a useful way to understand some of the harmful effects of social breakdown and disruption in Aboriginal communities that have come from colonization, forced assimilation, and relocation.” 7 Reversing the effects of hundreds of years of social disruption and alienation will take time. Reconciliation for the collective is a long-term process. Thank the Creator we are in that process in many people’s lives. Collective Reconciliation The road to addressing trauma and reconciliation did not just start with the current litigation. 8 Our community had to first deal with the impact of the removal of ceremony—the community dysfunction that resulted from the removal of ceremony as well as the disruption of family support systems and loss of loved ones. Most people who attended residential school focus on their experience of the abuse they suffered there; however, they usually only speak in private about the abuse and neglect they may have suffered within their own family or society. The years of alcoholism and violence experienced within families and communities from about the 1950s to the 1970s has not been addressed in the same public way as the residential school experience. Many people prefer to see these issues as being the result of colonization. That is a political world 364 | Maggie Hodgson
view. The therapeutic view is that regardless of where the abuse began, we have to acknowledge that in some cases it continued within our own families. The drinking was a direct response to the state of hopelessness and loss of identity caused by genocidal policies. However, beginning in the early 1970s, our families and communities dealt with the rampant drinking and violence with the support of provincial and federal funding. The very governments that structured the legislation outlawing our ceremonies supported the development of community-based, community-designed treatment programs managed and staffed by Aboriginal people under the direction of Elders. These centres embodied the very elements that were previously outlawed as pagan. Many of the people attending these programs were not only treated for their alcoholism, they also learned about ceremony. They learned through teachings that held ideas, values, and principles basic to individual and community mental health. Treatment built the understanding necessary so we could restore our spirits and take responsibility for preparing the way for our grandchildren. After three generations of involvement in treatment and recovery programs, our people started to return to post-secondary institutions, in part, to ensure our community professionals were from our communities. We were moving forward with our willingness to take responsibility to offset the genocidal acts on our spirit. The results are reflected in the number of Aboriginal people attending post-secondary institutions. Aboriginal enrolment in postsecondary institutions paralleled the huge increase in sobriety during those same years. 9 The Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission (AADAC) and the National Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program (NNADAP 10 ) funded about one hundred treatment programs across Canada. 11 These programs were staffed and managed by Aboriginal people and ceremony was a centre post to treatment. We were on the move with passion! Individuals and families continued in our process of healing and reconciliation. This became the foundation of the treatment centre movement, and it strengthened ceremony as a centre post to being at a place where trauma could more readily be put on the table. It was put on the table by social activists like Eric Shirt in treatment development and Charlene Belleau in community healing. There were other courageous people who came forward with criminal charges dealing with residential school abuse, and there were many others who worked to strengthen community. Charlene Belleau hosted the first National Residential School Conference with nine hundred people attending in 1990. I was part of a national television show about residential schools in the late 1980s. I was afraid there might be backlash because not only did we talk about the residential school From Truth to Reconciliation | 365
Page 1 and 2: Maggie Hodgson From From Truth Trut
Page 3 and 4: Reconciliation: A Spiritual Process
Page 5: speak, we have a responsibility to
Page 9 and 10: to the Aboriginal Working Caucus’
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Page 13 and 14: up to come home for the ceremony. H
Page 15 and 16: Things became heated and I said to
Page 17 and 18: to strengthen understanding and rec
Page 19: 12 Kishk Anaquot Health Research (2

Maggie Hodgson - Speaking My Truth

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