Thank you very much for the welcome to your territory and for your important work.
I'm here today to offer a few remarks and answer questions about, first of all, my work as the president of Nipissing University here in Ontario. I'm a first nations person from northwestern Ontario.
I'm going to speak specifically to 15 years of work at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which preceded my work at the university.
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation was a structural response to a very serious problem in first nations, so I think you can draw parallels and analogies to the work you're doing here. We were set up to address the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in residential schools, and we received an endowment from the federal government that provided us a number of advantages, not the least of which was that we were allowed to invest that endowment and stretch that money for what, at the end of the day, was 17 years.
We began in 1998. We did both funding and research. Led by a board of directors of 17 aboriginal citizens from across the country, we provided funding to 1,300 community projects that were residential-school specific. We were also responsible to monitor those projects, to ensure that money was used wisely, and that healing outcomes were achieved.
We supplemented that with $50 million in research over the course of the life of the foundation, in health, healing, reconciliation, a suicide project, etc., so I would say 30 pieces of research conducted across the country and, at the end of the day, publishing that research to ensure it had widespread use and uptake.
As a mechanism for addressing a very serious problem, like the one you're facing here, it had several strengths, not the least of which was that it had a national aboriginal board. It brought together perspectives from across the country. Secondly, we sustained funding from an endowment. You heard Dr. McCormick reference that, but non-short-term funding. I cannot say enough about the power of sustained funding, the idea that a project that is working in a small community that has very little else to sustain it, doesn't have to shut down for months at a time while funding applications weave their way through bureaucracies. Also, there's a consistency in the individuals who are working on these projects and a capacity to develop greater and greater skills as time goes on.
It doesn't sound like a long time, but some projects that were funded by the foundation were funded for up to 10 consecutive years, and the human resource capacity that was developed to address serious health issues in that time was quite remarkable.
Let me get into some of the community strengths. First, the foundation supported capacity for some and capacity development for others. It's an important distinction, and one that's actually very rare. Often what happens is capacity is developed or funding programs are developed that fund everyone equally, so that everyone is either equally happy or equally disappointed, depending on how you look at it. This formula funding that's rolled out often means that communities with a tremendous amount of capacity and capability are under-funded, and those that have very little in the way of capacity to deal with health are funded for something they have no ability to deliver. We see this happen across funding in the aboriginal community.
We focused on communities that had the capacity to deliver in-community programs. These programs were of their own design. They were a wide variety of counselling services, land-based programs, and elder-driven programs; it depended on what the community was prepared to offer.
Surprisingly, many communities found a way to blend traditional practices with western practices, so this was not a knee-jerk reaction to return to traditional means of delivering counselling services. You often found a blend. Communities used the tools that were available to them to best effect.
In terms of addressing suicide, I wanted to supplement Dr. McCormick's position on the historic transmission of trauma. The notion we are left with sometimes is that a lot of the suicide we see today had its genesis in the residential school programs many decades ago. This is a very difficult idea for us to get our heads around, the idea that something that could have happened decades ago might affect our behaviour today.
I think we have some interesting and robust evidence that's coming out of various places. Amy Bombay and her colleagues at Carleton University have shown how health outcomes for successive generations who did not attend residential schools, but are descended from aboriginal people who attended residential schools, are negatively affected by the fact that they come from a family of residential school survivors. I think this is something we really have to focus on.
Let me offer in the next minute or two a few notions of what I would recommend in terms of a national response to aboriginal suicide. First, however we find the mechanism, a sustained funding presence is absolutely critical. For those of you who have spent time discussing a variety of issues in the aboriginal community, you know the problems we have with funding applications. We see applications that begin at the beginning of a fiscal year. People often don't see money until halfway through. They have to rush to spend it in six months, and it reconvenes again at the end of the fiscal year when they apply again.
What you have is spasms of activity that are not consistent within the community. I cannot say enough about the importance of a sustained funding presence for programs that address suicide.
The second recommendation I would make is the review and use of existing consultations. There are some very rich consultations that have occurred across the country. The NAN territory has been consulted several times on the issue of aboriginal suicide. I know many of you have been active in that area as well. I don't know that we need more consultation on this. I think what we can do is take a good hard look at the consultation that's already gone on and review the directions that have been set already. There's great research and there are great consultations that already exist.
My third recommendation is that we tend toward community-developed programs, and in communities that have a track record of capacity in these areas. I recommend allowing the community to develop its own programs and then working with that community to offer sustained funding.
I would remiss if I didn't mention something about the importance of universities in all this. My concluding remark is that university-led programs that combine western and traditional counselling are emerging, and I think they hold real promise, especially for northern communities. Too often we see southern-trained or western-trained psychologists and psychiatrists who go into aboriginal communities; they have no intention of a sustained presence, and they leave not long after many wounds have been opened. What we're looking for is people who have been trained locally and can work locally in an ongoing way.
Those are my recommendations, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to address this group. Thank you.