All right. Thank you for having me.
Huy chexw a, ha7lh kwakwayel. Welcome.
I sit on the board of directors for Warriors Against Violence. Actually, I got wrangled into this at the last minute, so please bear with me: I might not have all the facts on hand.
Warriors Against Violence started out in the late 1990s with Daniel Parker and Joseph Fossella. It grew out of a need in the community for men to gather together and talk about the violence that they were perpetuating themselves.
Both Daniel and Joe were abusive in their relationships before, and they came to a point where they realized they couldn't continue on, and their wives wouldn't let them, so they came together. They went through programs like Change of Seasons. In that, there was cultural sensitivity to finding ways of ending the violence. So after all these other programs finished, they formed Warriors and decided they had to keep programs going on for men.
Warriors Against Violence gathers together. One of the things they do is improve awareness through education, health promotion, and training. They also have the ability to provide counselling and support as needed. They train participants to be facilitators themselves, because since we are based in Vancouver, out of the Kiwassa Neighbourhood House, a lot of times facilitators are asked to go to different communities, a lot of remote communities. They found that the need to train facilitators was there, so they had programs through the Native Education College and also programs within Warriors.
Warriors encourages participants to respect traditional perspectives. The men gather together at a sweat lodge or they gather together to sing. These are ways to find, in some ways, a spiritual connection, but also a bonding together of men that you don't find in the city.
Warriors also believes in confronting violence through culture. That is like finding traditional responsibilities of men in the community and realizing that violence isn't one of the responsibilities we have, so we should end that.
We also believe that first nations women and children are basically held hostage by the current values and beliefs of the dominant society. That basically means there are different types of violence against women, and one of them is social, economic, and systemic violence. A lot of the women who come to the program talk about how social workers have threatened them that under certain circumstances their kids are going to be taken away. We encourage the women to document anything of that nature, and we provide support when needed.
We also want to address all the issues that affect and damage first nations families and communities, whether alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual abuse...a lot of the social problems that have happened. There are also the effects of residential schools on generations afterward.
We meet together. It started out as a men's program, but we've expanded to include women, and now we have a youth program. The youth program is also getting younger and younger, so we're providing cultural events for the youth. Last weekend, for example, the youth went out and watched some eagles. A lot of youth in the city have no access to go to the land, so this is one way for them to see eagles in their natural environment.
We have also started specifically a women only program. So we provide the family program, the women's program, and the youth program, and we meet three times a week.
I believe that's all I have to say.
Thank you for your time.
Kukwstum'ckacw.