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

[Cassandra Blanchard]

Yes, to know what was going on, basically. It was bizarre.

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

That was what took your life from there, and—

[Cassandra Blanchard]

Yes. It took a couple of years to get an assessment. It was just having that medical care, a proper treatment plan, the right combo of medication, and an amazing psychiatrist.

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

Okay.

We met with a number of youth last night. It seems that the path to a more positive future is very different for different youth in terms of what they need. Your story is a little bit different from theirs. We were hearing from some of them that they found that the services were very daunting and actually were very unhelpful. I guess it's not always that way. Sometimes—

[Cassandra Blanchard]

I got lucky.

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

I appreciate that. Thank you.

To go to the specific work that's being done, I can appreciate your communities creating tools and letting communities take advantage of them, and not creating a lot of barriers and paperwork. Of course, it's always helpful to also be able to evaluate. What plans do you have in terms of an evaluation component? For example, your warrior program sounds kind of fun; it sounds intriguing. First of all, do you have an evaluation plan? Second of all, have you had any results from it?

[Gabriella Emery]

We have piloted and evaluated phase 1, which is for 10- to 12-year olds. That was the work that took place with our 12 pilot communities, with the preface that it's an upstream prevention program. Looking really long term, we can't tell you that it's preventing suicide right now. What we can tell you is the biggest learning that came out of that phase 1 evaluation was that kids had no idea about our history. It really gave them an opportunity to learn maybe why their community was the way it is, why maybe their parents got some things...it gave them an opportunity to have a deeper understanding of who they were. That was really neat to see. It's a history that a lot of Canada doesn't know, but it's a history that a lot of our own people don't know. That was the main learning that came out of Cuystwi phase 1.

Phase 2 is a part of a youth participatory Ph.D. dissertation project that's happening right now out of the University of British Columbia with Cowichan Tribes. They're looking to evaluate that program with that group of youth, and it just started this fall. We're really excited to see where that goes. They have a bunch of awesome young kids who are in high school, around 18 or 19 years old. They are taking ownership of the project and are going to be doing it that way.

I want to quickly say, it totally depends how you measure success. We really believe that communities need to be involved in determining what success looks like for them. It can't be something external, where we're saying success only looks like this, when we're not the ones living there. I think there are lots of different ways to measure success that aren't necessarily the typical ways.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

It was very well timed. Right to the minute.

The next question is from Mike Bossio, please.

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

Cathy you were going exactly in the direction that I was looking at going in myself, so I'm going to follow on that same line of questioning.

Why do you feel that it is important to the youth or to community to focus on the upstream part of this puzzle rather than the downstream? What is the connection there?

I know Cassandra spoke about how what was missing so much on her side was the psychiatric evaluation. Could this have offset...was it to approach the problem much sooner before it became a problem in the first place?

[Gabriella Emery]

That's the idea behind upstream prevention programming, you're trying to stop something before it happens. That's the message we got from communities. They wanted something that would help their youth become stronger and have a stronger sense of identity, instead of only worrying about the crisis intervention.

It's a very important piece. I'm not saying that's not something that needs to be there, but I'm saying we need to get to the root of the problem. We can't always be funnelling stuff when we're reacting to a situation. I think it's going back to looking at the determinants of health for indigenous people, and that includes colonization and racism. If we're not getting to those, then we're not going to stop the trickle that's happening that we see now.

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

You've really focused on the 10- to 12-year-olds. In this case, have you an indication yet that maybe it might be even more effective to apply it at an even younger age?

[Gabriella Emery]

We don't really tell anybody they have to use it for 10- to 12-year-olds. Again, that was the message we heard from community, and that was an age group the partners we were working with were concerned about. It's not to say we haven't had people who have shared their resources with their younger children or have had conversations with, but maybe they didn't use the whole training. It's really meant to be flexible. There are no boxes they have to check that says they are 10 years old or they're 13 years old and they can't take that training.

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

Perfect. This is exactly what we've been talking about so often. The priorities need to be set by the community and driven by the community.

You're really acting as a facilitator for the community. You even tweak the program in the direction that they think it needs to go in, establishing that historical perspective or the path that we want to go through, the warrior path. Whatever dimension that might take, you are going to help them to design it to be more effective for their specific perspective.

[Gabriella Emery]

Yes. The program is really meant to be a conversation starter that will provide you with some baseline information about colonization, or things about the Indian Act or residential schools. That community has its own teachings, values, and perspective on that issue that are more valid than we could ever just blanket with a program that was supposed to cover every first nations group in B.C.

It's really meant for communities to use as a resource and then put their expertise, knowledge, and teachings into using it in their communities how they see fit. We're not there to dictate how they use it.

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

I know as well—following on Cathy's questioning—that downstream you can measure the performance of a given program based on how many people you were able to save, but upstream, at some point, you need to look at it and ask how you are doing. I realize that from 2012 to now you went through the development of the program, the pilot, designing the specific criteria to fit that community, but where do you see the performance metrics coming out of it? How do you measure the effectiveness of it?

[Gabriella Emery]

We are definitely looking at tracking the number of participants after we do a larger launch of the program. So far, we have just been working with people who have come to us. As I said, the program is being piloted in Cowichan in the upcoming year, and they're looking at having youth develop indicators of success themselves. The community is coming together with the youth to evaluate it. They will say what is working for them as Cowichan youth in that community.

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

Great.

What was the initial catalyst for this? Did you see this somewhere else or was it really homegrown in B.C.? Are you now taking it to other jurisdictions outside of B.C.?

[Gabriella Emery]

The idea came from the communities. They wanted something that was online so that it would be much more accessible and a wider audience could use it. That being said, there is a lot of wonderful programming going on. A lot of the research that we looked at when the development started came out of the former Zuni life skills development program, as well as warrior programs run by communities. The Nak’azdli First Nation had a very similar program.

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

Are you working with any others?

[Gabriella Emery]

We have done presentations at different health conferences about it, but it's fairly B.C.-specific. It uses B.C. geography and B.C. youth. People can use it as they like. We're not saying no to other provinces if they want to use it, but we preface it by saying that it's B.C.-specific.

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

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

We're out of time for questions in this round. Thank you.

Before we conclude though, the chair doesn't normally ask questions but I'm going to use my prerogative to ask just one, very briefly.

Ask Auntie, this beautiful process drawing in the back of your presentation...there's quite a bit of online stuff there. There are the aunties online; you mentioned the YouTube channel. How's the uptake on that? Are you getting traffic with those things? Do you feel it's a good thing? Is it working?

[Gabriella Emery]

We have definitely had a wider range. We just got social media approval not that long ago. We have a staff member, the third member of our team, who is really social media savvy. She has increased our presence quite a bit. We have also had different organizations approach us to use some of our videos in their own training. I think it's really interesting to see the ripple effect. It's not necessarily just youth who are watching our videos or using them. People are looking to use some of the content we've developed elsewhere as well, so that has been really interesting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

That's a good sign.

[Gabriella Emery]

Yes.