I'd like to begin by thanking the standing committee for inviting the Native Women's Shelter here to the table. We are very happy to be here.
My name is Nakuset, and I'm the executive director of the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal. Our mission is to provide a safe and supportive environment that strengthens cultural identity, self-esteem, and independence for aboriginal women and their children.
According to Shingwauk's Vision, the Jesuit experiment in boarding school education got under way after 1636. The Native Women's Shelter created the “Moving Towards the Seventh Generation” project and was granted funding by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in October 1999. As the shelter was aware of the horrendous abuses that took place in the residential schools, our project was designed to offer healing to those impacted by the crippling effects of the intergenerational trauma from these schools.
Some of the abuses suffered included sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and psychological abuse. The impacts of these abuses are far-reaching and include, but are not limited to, broken family systems, loss of culture, loss of language, loss of traditions and ceremonies, internalized shame, anger, chronic addiction, dependency thinking, spiritual and cultural shame, mistrust of leadership and authority, and physical abuse of children and other vulnerable people.
The knowledge of this dark piece of history that continues to plague our people to this day led us to develop a comprehensive healing program that addresses the majority of issues I just mentioned.
Our programs were strongly grounded in the teachings of--