Thank you.
Honourable members, I thank you, and I am privileged to present to you today in support of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
I acknowledge the Algonquin people of this land for having me here today to work.
As you heard, I am Yvonne Rigsby-Jones. In the Snuneymuxw First Nation my calling has been to assist the healing process of many of our people, with the guidance of elders and tradition balanced with western therapies.
I am the executive director of Tsow-Tun Le Lum treatment centre on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We have led the way over the past twenty years in the area of assisting residential school survivors heal from their experiences.
However, today I speak not only as an administrator, but also as the wife of a survivor, the mother of children who have suffered the intergenerational impacts, and a grandmother. I am totally committed to creating a life free of abuse for our children, who so richly deserve that.
My husband John is a survivor of the Port Alberni Indian Residential School. In the early 1990s he was involved in one of the first court cases against a dormitory supervisor at Port Alberni.
Really, no one understands. The current government is meeting the obligations that were set out in the settlement agreement, and I acknowledge that, but I also know and understand the ongoing need for community-driven and culturally based programs. Many of our past and current residents are absolute miracles. They demonstrate resiliency and strength in order to get up and face each new day.
We know the positive impacts of having the Aboriginal Healing Foundation programs, as recorded in the recent evaluation by the Department of Indian Affairs. We know from past experience that not having the projects in place recycles the harm back to communities, creating a domino effect of harm statistics, and money spent on crisis intervention such as hospitalization and child welfare, and the likelihood of increased spousal assaults.
With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission work beginning, and the number of hearings that are still to be held, former student memory banks will be opened. They will be living flashbacks and having anxiety and, along with their families, will be experiencing many triggers.
Internationally known psychologist Bessel van der Kolk's research has found that flashbacks are not just bad dreams, but are a reliving of the whole traumatic experience and are felt again in the survivor's body. Physical and sexual abuse account for a large part of the legacy of the Indian residential school impact and were an integral part of the work that has been done by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
Since discussing the lack of funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation is the purpose of my presence here today, I have gathered information from a few research projects to support the monetary value of continuing to fund community-based aboriginal projects. I would also like to note that for many survivors of the Indian residential schools, developing trust with non-aboriginal people is a barrier, given their many negative experiences, and it is something they have also passed on to their children. So the presence of community-based programs, the services offered by Health Canada, and therapists help build bridges for more successful relationships with non-aboriginal people.
There are Health Canada services available. They are fee-for-service and not always aboriginal-sensitive or easily accessible. Resolution health support workers can offer initial support and referral but are not intended to address long-term trauma counselling needs.
I was taught early in my training that recovery from childhood sexual abuse takes at least three years of committed therapy. That, along with residential school trauma and loss of identity, makes the issues that survivors and their families face extremely complex.
Addressing the allocation of scarce resources and continuing to fund foster children, incarceration, and homeless initiatives are not the best outcomes for Canadians' tax dollars.
The Cedar Project in British Columbia has been doing research, they say, with purpose. They're published in the academic world and are recognized as credible researchers. One of their recent papers states that sexual trauma will continue to impact individuals, families, and communities until unresolved trauma is meaningfully addressed in client-driven, culturally safe programs.
Sexual abuse has been linked to many health issues, including mental, sexual, and drug-related vulnerabilities. I also worked with the Corrections Canada contract, which had many meetings based on that work.
The recent statistic for youth in juvenile detention is that over 50% in British Columbia today are aboriginal. There's a recent Correctional Services Canada evaluation, and that report documents the over-representation of aboriginal people in the federal institutions.
Quoting Dr. Stephen Duckett, CEO of Alberta's health services, in 2009:
The science of economics is cast in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it is portrayed as being about naive cost cutting, but that is not what I think people in this room would understand about economics. As you all know, economics is about how to allocate scarce resources...
Continuing to fund the Aboriginal Healing Foundation addresses many of the cost issues in the health care system in many other ways. There are many success stories of people, approximately 1,700 to date, who have completed treatment at our project. We are just one of many projects that have contributed to community healing funded by the foundation.
At Tsow-Tun Le Lum, we have done this work for enough years to have witnessed three generations of the same family attend healing programs. I have personally worked with incarcerated individuals. One of our former residents has never looked back. He is now grown up and works inside of a federal institution, after moving from the juvenile system to provincial system to the federal system; he's been out of incarceration since the early nineties. And he's just one of our stories.
As the schools ran for over 100 years, funding the healing process for such a short time seems desperately inadequate. Breaking the cycles of abuse is generational. I have a six-year-old granddaughter, and I'm her only grandparent who did not attend residential school. We have a 40-year-old staff member who attended residential school. These intergenerational effects are not history; they are still very present today.
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation projects are not a one-size-fits-all design. They demonstrate clearly the empowerment of individual communities to stand together and work together to create change that increases overall well-being and peace. For many survivors and their family members the ability to stay clean and sober is challenged until the trauma recovery work is addressed.
For many of the people who are faced with allocating funds, statistics are numbers; for our community members they represent sisters, brothers, parents, or children.
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation has a wealth of research documenting what works. To be able to continue healing our communities in a culturally safe environment is really important. If there are fewer children in care, fewer people incarcerated, fewer children growing up in family violence, that creates significant cost savings to the government in other areas.
In my preparation I lost a couple of paragraphs of statistics. They must be lost in cyberspace in my computer somewhere. But I know from our own project we did a...
Is it time to wind up?