Aboriginal Healing Foundation: Straightgoods.com
 
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 23:04:24 -0500 (CDT)

from: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature6.cfm?REF=264
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation

Reclaiming indigenous languages could be the key to recovery from 
generations of sexual abuse.

Dateline: Sunday, April 23, 2006

by Stewart Steinhauer

So what do we do about something like sexual abuse, here at Saddle Lake?

One of the school counselors, working with elementary school children here 
at Saddle Lake, described her experiences when she tried to deliver the 
Alberta Learning curriculum content developed to safe-guard children from 
sexual abuse. The course content describes sexual abuse, and makes 
suggestions for how children should deal with it.

She presented the material twice: each time she had near-100 percent 
disclosures from the children she was presenting to. There were no systems 
in place to deal with near-100 percent disclosures.

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Twice, discussions of sexual abuse at Saddle Lake school resulted in 100 
percent of the students disclosing it had happened to them.

The only solution she could come up with was to stop presenting the 
information package. She observed that it was more disturbing to the 
children to have it brought out into the open, and then receive no help 
with it, than to leave it submerged.

Only through real healing will we, as a species, be able to tackle this and 
other 'problems'. The Nehiyo Nation totters on the brink of extinction, and 
sexual abuse is just one of the many 'tools' in the social engineering 
toolkit being used by Canada.

If nearly 100 percent of our population is being sexually abused, and, as a 
result, turning into sexual abusers as adults, does this mean that we 
should all be apprehended at once?

Let's see. We'll apprehend all of the children, and put all of the adults 
in prison. Yeah. That ought to do it. Ooops! Been there, done that, bought 
the teeshirt. That's exactly what the Residential School era was about. 
Mandatory attendance for children, and a pass law for the adults.

I agree with Dr. Roland Chrisjohn, who suggests that the 'health' problems 
we indigenous peoples face are not internal, but external. He suggests that 
a crime of enormous proportions has been committed, for instance in the 
so-called Indian Residential Schools, and he suggests that first we name 
the crime, (in his opinion, the correct name is genocide) and bring a 
healing form of justice into being. He notes that all of the existing 
justice systems are participating in the genocide, and that new systems 
will have to developed. He then suggests that, after the crime of genocide 
has been stopped, if indigenous peoples still need some personal 'healing', 
let's just do it.

I propose we start the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and that we heal 
ourselves by reclaiming our own language. Finding the sound track to that 
early memory [of being sexually abused] helped me to begin separating the 
action of trying to speak cree, from the triggering of feelings connected 
to early childhood sexual abuse.

I've tried everything that European systems have to offer, and I've tried 
some of what the indigenous system has to offer, but nothing has come 
closer to performing healing for me than trying to speak my other mother's 
first language....

much more at: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature6.cfm?REF=264

Penney Kome, author and journalist
http://penneykome.ca
Editor, Straight Goods, http://straightgoods.com 

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