Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the panellists and welcome to the people in the gallery. We're very happy to have you here. We're grateful that you're here. We're also grateful to be meeting today on the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish nation.

We are the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs of the House of Commons. I am stating this for the record, so we all know where we are and that we are in the right place. We are continuing our study on suicide among indigenous youth and in indigenous communities this morning.

In the next hour, we are hearing from two organizations. They are the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, welcome to Mavis Benson, and Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society, welcome to Scott Clark, the executive director. I am happy to give each of you the floor for 10 minutes this morning.

After the two 10-minute testimonies, we'll move onto questions from all of the members. We will wind up at about 9:30 a.m. I'm not sure if you've decided who would like to go first, or if it matters.

The honour is yours, Mr. Clark.

[Scott Clark, Executive Director, Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society]

Good morning, my name is Scott. I am Coast Salish from Vancouver Island. I am currently the executive director of an urban aboriginal organization known as Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society, ALIVE. We've been around for approximately seven years and we are a resident-based organization. We do not take government money for programs, and our goal as an organization is to seek to create opportunities throughout Vancouver's 24 communities taking on the existing barriers. We develop processes with the parks boards, the school boards, and the City of Vancouver to identify the barriers, create solutions, and create opportunities so all urban indigenous peoples have equality of opportunity for conditions.

Saying that, I also wear another title, which is the vice-president of the Northwest Indigenous Council, which is perhaps Canada's newest provincial off-reserve political organization representing off-reserve aboriginal peoples. Very recently, in the last six weeks, we just got membership in the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples as our national political organization to advocate on behalf of the interests of our people living off-reserve throughout Canada.

We did get short notice that this event was happening, and we are very pleased to be able to have the opportunity to present some of the key issues we've identified here in Vancouver as they relate to suicide, and most importantly, about how we address it in an innovative way that moves beyond the status quo we've seen among all levels of government, which in essence in the urban environment here in Vancouver has ghettoized indigenous people, segregated them, and reduced their level of choice. We've been working quite diligently for the last seven years on an evidence-based innovative approach on how we should move forward to get in front of issues like suicide, child apprehension, graduation, and the whole array of issues. We know what the approach needs to have in order to support all vulnerable populations.

In saying that, I want to share this with you. About this time four years ago, we had a press conference here in east Vancouver in the Grandview-Woodlands area, and that press conference dealt with a suicide pact that was averted back in late October four years ago. Thirty young people had made a commitment to commit suicide together in east Vancouver. The outreach workers and the police were able to identify 24 of those 30 young people, and bring them to the hospital and have them assessed. They identified that all of them were aboriginal. They were all under the age of 15, mostly 13 to 15, and mostly aboriginal girls who were being preyed upon by gangs, older men, in the east Vancouver area, a hop, skip and a jump from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where our young people get preyed upon for peddling drugs, sexually exploited, and all the things that we've come to know and that research has shared with us.

Immediately upon learning of this suicide pact, we and a number of our key organizations organized an emergency crisis response, which we identified as a youth matters crisis response, bringing together in essence about 60 different organizations and government levels that all claimed to be working to support the vulnerable children and families in Vancouver's east side. Through that emergency response, with Christmas around the corner, we recognized that we not only had to support just the young people, but we also had to support the families because of the unstable housing, the issues around education, and so forth.

Through the youth matters emergency response four years ago today, we have created what we call a “community partnership agreement”. I believe we have sent you that information and it's going to be translated for you. I don't have a copy here.

In the last four years—and much to the dismay of many who like the status quo here in Vancouver—we've been able to develop a process to work with vulnerable children and families from the ground up. We work from needs before they become issues, from the prenatal stage, when the fetus is inside mummy's tummy, all the way through a post-secondary graduation strategy. We bring in partners from academia, the hospitals, the schools, the community centres, the libraries, the police, and everyone else out there who is providing services.

You've all heard the expression, “It takes a village to raise a child,” but have you ever seen a village in an urban context? The answer to that is virtually “no,” because we have created a system in Canada for the last 70 years where we've segregated urban indigenous populations. We have taken the on-reserve model, replicated it in the off-reserve context, and never questioned that. We've never had the evidence to say that it actually works.

In 2011, the “Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study” came out. It is a national study looking at the needs and aspirations of urban indigenous populations. It tells a very different story from what service providers tell, a story about wanting to take our place in the community, to graduate, to have housing, and to have real opportunities like every other Canadian or Vancouverite. We are very proud of who we are. The issues are immense, i.e., racism and discrimination. We know about that, but that study was a key study that challenged the status quo.

Since November, 2012, which was the time of the suicide pact on which we did a press conference, we have been working with a whole array of other partners, principally out of the Ray-Cam Cooperative Centre where we have been working on this model for nine years. We have now extended it from that community centre to five other community centres.

We are now building villages in each of those five communities, pulling them together, doing the research, connecting the services, and challenging the non-aboriginal organizations. We ask, “Where is your aboriginal strategy? Do you hire aboriginal people? Are they on your board of directors? Are they members? Are you working with the non-indigenous population through a reconciliation lens?”

All of these hard questions are things our political leaders have been saying for at least 10 years at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels, but you never see them being developed and organized at the community level.

This is what we have been doing here in Vancouver. We are very pleased, because the evidence from our partners through the University of British Columbia is showing that we're actually getting the results we've been seeking. By bringing the doctors and nurses right into the programs, and those services into a community centre, we're able to connect with the programs and services, build up the trust level, and then build those relations so that assessments happen at a much earlier date. We bring in the dentists, the lawyers, and so forth.

We had the highest vulnerability rate of children going into kindergarten in the province of B.C. After four years of the model we've been developing, we were able to reduce our vulnerability from 73% to 50%. While the federal and provincial governments were cutting programs and services, we were able to unite organizations and develop a proactive, evidence-based model that is starting to show real results, where urban indigenous children and families can take their place in their community, on the board of directors, designing programs and services.

We call this model a collective impact, place-based approach.

This is a model that's been developed around the world, but you only have to go down to the United States and look at another model down there, which this is based on, called Promising Neighborhoods. The recommendation I would make to this committee is to look at the Promising Neighborhoods model and look at having a pilot project across this country, because you cannot deal with suicide in isolation of poverty, housing, homelessness, education, and so forth. If you want to be serious about this, then you need to start to looking at a more comprehensive approach that's grounded in indigenous philosophy and that has a nice reconciliation lens to it.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you so much, Mr. Clark. That's much appreciated.

Ms. Benson, go ahead, please.

[Mavis Benson, Member, Cheslatta Carrier Nation]

Thank you.

I also got notice late yesterday. Can you give me two days' notice at least? No, just a few hours.

I'm here representing the Cheslatta Carrier Nation. I would like to thank the Coast Salish first nation for allowing me to be here on their territory to tell my story.

My name is Mavis Benson. I am from the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, which is in central northern B.C. It's a semi-isolated community. You take a ferry west of Burns Lake for about 15 kilometres. It takes about 15 minutes, and my community is on that side beside two other bands and a non-native community.

I am also a mother and the grandmother to three of my grandchildren. I am their sole caregiver. I'm sorry, I'm sick, too, so they got me at a really good time.

I want to share my story with you all because I believe it's the story of thousands, a story that shares a similar core to other people, and a story that I hope inflicts a spark for change.

Suicide has taken many lives in my community of Cheslatta. This is due to colonialism, the Indian residential schools, and the forceable eviction of our people in 1952 from their traditional territory.

Our community used to be a close-knit, culturally oriented community that worked together in all aspects of life. Due to the Indian residential schools, we have lost most of our language, culture, and identity. Our community is fractured and lateral violence is the norm. Alcohol was a part of my life growing up, and violence and sexual abuse came with that. This is not only for me, it was for the majority of my cousins, everybody that I know my age, and younger and older. The forceable eviction of my people from their traditional homelands took their pride, their way of life, and their culture. They were forced to live in a foreign world, one that was unkind and unwelcoming. The people began to drink to numb the pain of both the Indian residential school and the forceable eviction. This intergenerational trauma continues in our community and our peoples today, especially on-reserve.

As an example, I will give you a short bio of my life. My presentation is quite different from Scott's, and I'd like to thank Scott for his presentation.

At the age of nine, I was put into Lejac Indian Residential School. I was told it was for my own good, that I would get a good education there, and that they would treat me better than I was treated at home. I remember being excited and scared at the same time. That dream of a caring and loving educational environment was crushed as soon as I took that long walk up those stairs to the school's doors. I experienced racism amongst my own people, as well as abuse by adult supervisors.

My first day of class was exciting, as I sat down and got ready to join all the other children. The teacher had me do a test to see what level I would be put into, A being the smarter kids, and B, C and D being the dumbest, as she stated.

She put me in the corner by myself, and I completed the test without any problems. I happily turned my test into her, and she marked it while I sat at my desk. She came up to me and said I cheated. She hit my hands hard with a yardstick and called me a “stupid, dirty Indian”. I was put into group C. I later found out that I didn't get any questions wrong, so why did she do this? It confused me for many years as to how I approached my academics. Do I try to do my best? If I do, I may get punished. So I don't, and then I get punished anyway. I ended up making sure that I did not get all my answers correct. I intentionally got questions wrong because I did not want to get hit again. It was not an experience I'll ever forget, and this was an experience for many of my peers in my classes.

You see, in Indian residential school, education was never the priority, discipline was. I was made to feel inferior and stupid, something I still deal with today. I lost touch with who I was in an educational context and at a personal level. I was made to hate myself and authority figures. This is a fact of life for all of the members of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation. Drugs, alcohol, and addiction to prescriptions is the norm.

When I returned to my community later on after residential school, I continued to endure horrific abuses of all kinds at the hands of a family member, who was also a residential school survivor of 15 years. My only refuge was when I attended school, where the teachers always encouraged me to excel at everything I did.

I clearly remember the day when the special education class started, because I did not see any of my cousins or friends in my classes. I asked my teacher about this, and he said they were put into a special class. I wanted to go to that class too. I demanded to go to that class now. My teacher told me to go sit down and do my work, and basically just shut up, so I went and sat down and shut up.

Anyway, when I think about it now, I'm forever grateful to my teachers for believing in my potential as an academic student, because to clarify, all those students who were put into that class never did graduate. That's where the problems starts, and one of the biggest problems that we have in our communities to this day is graduating illiterate community members, and I see it in my community.

My home life was not a good one. It was one fuelled by alcohol, violence, poverty, and sexual abuse. That continued daily for most of my childhood. Many times I tried ending my life, but to no avail. To clarify, the first time I sliced my wrist was at the age of 10. No one in my family cared. I just cried myself to sleep and woke up the next day feeling weak, but still alive. I tried this a couple more times in my teen years, but again I didn't succeed, thank goodness.

At the age of 13, I ran away from home due to the unrelenting abuse that I had to endure daily. Thinking that running away was going to solve my problems was a fantasy, and reality hit quickly. I went from one hell to another. At the age of 16 I had my one and only daughter, and I did not know how to be a parent. As a single mother, not long after my daughter was born, I went back home to my community to find my way in life. During that time, I felt a yearning to return to high school and graduate. If it had not been for school during my younger years, then I would have died at a very young age due to the intergenerational trauma that I experienced.

While my story is one of hope and resiliency, more must be done, and each and every one of you in this room is capable of helping to make the calls to action for meaningful social change, as it pertains to our aboriginal youth and families, and our communities on- and off-reserve, especially on-reserve. A hope for a better future through a purposeful healing and educational system is needed.

I also have some ideas here. For example, in our community, when there is an attempted suicide, we have to call 911. Well, Burns Lake is close to 800 kilometres from Kamloops, and 911 dispatch goes to Kamloops. There is no 911 in Burns Lake. The ferry stops at 11 o'clock at night, and suicides usually happen after drinking late at night, between 12 and six in the morning. Those are the times that we usually experience all of the incidents of anything, such as someone getting beat up, a murder, or someone going missing. Parties happen at that time, and suicide attempts usually occur during that time in our community. When we call 911, they dispatch us to Kamloops, to that dispatch, and it takes forever. I'm thankful we have that contact to 911, but there should be one in Burns Lake itself.

The ferry service stops at 11 p.m., and it doesn't start until 5:30 in the morning, so when someone does try to commit suicide, it takes forever for the ambulance, at least an hour and a half to two hours. If they rush, it's an hour and a half to start up the ferry, to get the ferry going, and get the ambulance. If there's no ambulance service—they have an ambulance service on the south side—and if they're not available, or if no one's there—they volunteer on the south side—then they have to wait for the one from Burns Lake to come. They have to get the ferry across to the north side, bring it back over to the south side, and then dispatch it wherever.

Our community is 50 kilometres in radius. We're not a community with all the houses in one spot. We're 50 kilometres apart from one end of our community to the other. We're very spread apart. I believe that we need better ambulance service with people who are certified to be ambulance paramedics, and that's one of the biggest things in our community.

I also have three other recommendations. One is that we have a trauma counsellor rather than counsellors in our community. Counsellors in our community rotate every two years. They do their time, and then they leave. When I was working there, I decided to see a counsellor. She had to leave, and then they said, “Oh, there's another one coming in.” I'm not going to tell my story over and over again, I'm just not going to do that, and if I don't do that, who else is going to do it? No one's going to do it, and it has continued. I've left my community in 2009 to do my undergrad degree and then my graduate degree.

So no one's going to do that. They're just not going to do it. I highly recommend a trauma counsellor in our community, and also treatment for families regarding historical trauma in our communities, especially the ones who have gone through suicide—like we've all gone through it—but the ones with suicide attempts or they've committed suicide. They need trauma counselling. They don't need alcohol counselling; they need trauma counselling. That's what we're experiencing.

I also totally agree with a community centre, of course, as Scott said, for sports and culture. We need our cultural teachings and our language to be brought back to life. That would bring the spirit back of our people.

I'd like to thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thanks very much, Ms. Benson, for that.

We will go right into questions now. These are seven-minute questions.

The first question is from Mike Bossio, please.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

There's so much information there, and so many similarities from other witnesses we've heard from. Well they're similar but not similar, because everyone's individual story is so personal and different, and difficult.

You mentioned the three recommendations that you had, and I liked that they were very specific. Many times they're a much larger picture, but you've drilled down at a very specific level.

Right now, today, you have a counsellor who comes in to the community. They are general counsellors for alcohol and drugs, and I assume other social...mental health aspects as well, but they're not trained specifically on the trauma side of things.

[Mavis Benson]

No.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

So they're not able to provide.... Would it be another resource that would benefit you most, or do you think that the central training of these counsellors should be to deal with trauma and that the others be secondary?

[Mavis Benson]

Yes, I really believe that.

For example, the counsellors are sent in by the Carrier Sekani Family Services. They're hired by them and they go into the communities that are a part of this organization. They do a two-year term. They graduate from post-secondary. They have to do two years in order to get certified. Once they're done their two years, they're not going to stay on the south side, so they leave.

They're not specifically, as you said, trained for trauma; they have some trauma counselling. I really believe, for example, that we need psychologists out there, and dealing with trauma specifically.

I go to see Rob Hadley. He's a hypnotherapist, and that's how I started dealing with my trauma. I went to see counsellors here in Vancouver for many years. Once I started seeing him, he made a big, big difference in my life. He's given me hope. He's helped me through law school. Otherwise, I would never have graduated, because the insecurities, the trauma, all of that started coming back. When you first go to law school, the first year is hell. It is hell. He helped me with that.

We do specifically need trauma counsellors, and I believe they have to be specifically trauma related.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Trauma related from a standpoint of indigenous—

[Mavis Benson]

Yes.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

—experiential trauma, rather than just trauma, right?

[Mavis Benson]

Yes.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Are the counsellors indigenous?

[Mavis Benson]

No, not always. I don't believe we've even had one who was indigenous.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I've had a number of witnesses in the past say we should be focusing our indigenous youth, through the education system, very early on, in getting involved in health, in education, in a number of different fields like this in grade 3 or grade 4. This would start to move them in these directions so that we can start to employ local indigenous people into these very important roles, because they're typically going to have greater longevity within the community.

At the same time, it's training them to the social and economic predeterminants that exist within their communities around alcoholism, around drug addiction, around sexual assault and violence, to enable them to see the signs of potential suicide. Then it's being able to take particular actions within their own home, within their own community, to try to identify and deal with and focus on it, before it becomes a crisis.

The first group that brought this to our attention was the Indigenous Nurses Association. Would you agree that would be beneficial to do at such a young age? Would it benefit youth?

[Mavis Benson]

I believe that awareness of culture and language is really important and critical at a young age. It should be implemented in the schools. I have to say I don't agree that we should focus our young kids just on health and wellness. Cultural awareness and language are our health and wellness. That's the way we build our strong identity on who we are.

All of our children can't, as you said, become health workers. None of my kids are going to be health workers, regardless of what I went through. Of my three grandchildren, one is going to be an actress or singer, one is a soccer player, and the other one is just three years old, so I don't know yet.

In my community, a lot of the community members have aspirations. Yes, maybe if you notice one or two who are very interested in health, then focus on them and encourage them, but we also have to encourage the other children to do what they want to do. What is their dream? None of them have dreams. None of them have aspirations. You ask, “What are you going to do after you graduate”. They say, “Oh probably just go on welfare like my parents or work for the band.” That's the common response, and it's quite sad. That's why I say we have to focus on our young children and their aspirations.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Sorry, I should have qualified that. Yes, the cultural heritage side of it is the most important aspect of it. I couldn't agree more, and I've seen that with many different communities and many different witnesses, but this is an additional thing to add to it, to try to educate our much younger youth on the social determinants that exist within their social economics in their communities.

[Mavis Benson]

Yes, I agree with how you stated it there. Don't they have classes? My daughter goes to this one class called social education, or something like that. I think they should have it at a younger age, but that doesn't mean that we're gearing them toward a career in health. I think, yes, awareness in that area and awareness that they can come to someone and talk to them.

When I was young, my teachers knew what was going on. They called the ministry. The ministry was too scared of my father. The cops didn't want to come. Social awareness is important. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thanks.

The next question is from Cathy McLeod.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you to both the witnesses.

I first have a quick question to Ms. Benson. Does your community have good broadband, and is there any way to provide support and services? I know that throughout Canada we're going to have challenges with that counselling revolving door, but it is shown to be effective. Is that something that is available right now in your community, a broadband connection for telehealth?

[Mavis Benson]

Yes, at the health centre we have, the Southside Health and Wellness Centre, they do have a broadband connection, but a lot of our community members just won't go there. I have bronchitis, so I now go to the health and wellness centre. For issues where it's mental and physical—I say physical because physical is mental too—they're not going to go, because they're too ashamed. They don't know what depression is. A lot of them don't know that they're depressed. I never knew until my late 30s that I was going through depression my whole life since I was really young and from when I first tried to commit suicide. There is not the awareness of what depression is. How does that look, and how does anxiety feel? You know.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I guess if there were going to be some services that were consistent and long term, then there would also have to be a lot of work around gaining acceptance in the community. That is something that's helpful.

[Mavis Benson]

Yes.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Clark, there were a few areas that I wanted to follow up on.

You said your organization has no funding, so how do you sustain yourself?