Evidence of meeting #51 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was family.
NDP
Jean Crowder NDP Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC
Ms. Hansen, can you give us some specifics? If this committee were to go away and write a report and say, we think the government should do x...what do you think the government should do to take on those issues?
Representative, Little Warriors
We need to focus more on the healing aspect. I agree with having programs like this, province-wide. I'm glad you have one here. But we need to focus on the healing aspects so that aboriginal women and children, or whoever is being abused, can embrace their culture and who they are.
I'm a professional counsellor. I see aboriginal people transformed in front of my face when they start to identify. You know, we are human beings. We have a culture. Actually, the language embraces that culture. It's a living language. More programs like that need to be done. I'm talking about first nations people talking to first nations people--like myself. I come here and I use my music. It was a little bit scary, but at the same time that's who I am. That's who I am as an aboriginal woman. I do it through my music, my language, and my culture. I would not be at that place if I didn't have that healing, that contact.
Executive Director, Métis Child and Family Services Society
We live in the aboriginal community. I think we know just about every aboriginal person we read about in the newspapers. We have to start working with the families. We have to start with the individuals. We have to provide that support to them. We're not doing enough of that. That's where it has to start. It has to start at a young age.
We have great early childhood programs--Success by 6, Aboriginal Head Start--but we lose that when they go to grade one. We have nothing after Success by 6. We have to stay connected with these children because we have to start with the young generation. A good example is when they brought the dental program into Saskatchewan many years ago, they started it at grade one. So everybody in grade one got a dental exam and their teeth fixed. Then they maintained them when they went to grade two, grade three, and grade four, and everybody else who came in at grade one received services. In 12 years they had a complete, dentally fit group of young adults.
I think you can introduce programs like that. You have to find a base place to start. The base place is with the very young, because little children.... I have 10 grandchildren. They're very honest; they tell me everything. They tell their teachers everything. Once we engage the families of the young children, then we have to stay with them and provide that family support. When you maintain relationships, it's relationships that are key. You have to build that relationship with that parent and that family and maintain it.
NDP
Jean Crowder NDP Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC
Thank you.
Ms. Nepinak, you've talked about the comprehensive strategy. Could you give us a specific starting point? If we were to go away tomorrow and start something, what would it look like?
Executive Director, Awo Taan Healing Lodge Society
Thank you.
I believe one of the areas I would certainly look at is developing community capacity. I believe that any community, whether it's a very remote and isolated community or a major urban centre such as Calgary, should be resourced and equipped, staffed, and financially resourced to build the community from ground zero, so that aboriginal families learn the skills to.... I should go back and say that most families have those skills. But how do we support families and communities, including our elected officials, to work together to begin to talk about the issue of family violence?
Family violence in our aboriginal communities continues to be a very painful subject. Many of our leaders are not talking about the issue, and we need ambassadors from our leadership to talk about family violence and to build communities that are adequately resourced.
We receive families from many remote and isolated communities from across the province, from Saskatchewan and across the country. Taking these families from their cultural community and bringing them into a jungle like Calgary is very traumatic and difficult for them.
Another thing I would recommend very quickly is that the three levels of government--the federal government, the provincial government, as well as the municipal government--need to talk to each other to support these initiatives and strategies that are happening, because we need to move away from the jurisdictional issues and be able to challenge that as well, to say that our women are dying--they're dying on the streets, they're dying wherever they are--and we need to take some action around it.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Dona Cadman
Thank you, Josie. Your time is up. Sorry.
Now we go to five minutes, and we'll be starting with Ms. Neville.
Liberal
Anita Neville Liberal Winnipeg South Centre, MB
Thank you again.
Ms. Nepinak, you ended where I was going to begin in terms of the interjurisdictional issues.
Mr. Langford, one of the things that I was particularly interested in that you commented on in your opening remarks was the fact that you have social workers in the public education system.
I have spent many years involved in the Winnipeg school division as a board member, and I have been very immersed in aboriginal matters. While the school system has its own social work component, it does not have--and I may be out of date--an aboriginal-based agency providing support to it in a very concrete way.
Could you tell us a little bit about that? It might be something we can build on.
Executive Director, Métis Child and Family Services Society
We've been running our Choices school program for 17 years now. We have aboriginal social workers. They're in the five highest needs schools in the city, where there are large numbers of aboriginal children. We provide a morning snack, and it allows the children who have issues or difficulties to come and get a snack and maybe talk to the social worker and set up a chance to come back and discuss what's bothering them. A lot of it is family violence--addictions issues, peer pressure, run-ins with the law, the justice system--but we do a lot of cultural stuff.
Right now in my five schools I've had a couple of young aboriginal role models, James Jones and Linsay Willier, the next best model in Canada, who is on that dance program. They're aboriginal and they go into the schools and do an hour and a half presentation to the kids, just to show them what is possible. James is a graduate of Amiskwaciy Academy, which is the aboriginal high school in the city here.
There are lots of these little aboriginal programs and cultural ceremonies, and jigging. We teach jigging. I have a music teacher. We have over 200 students. We teach fiddle and guitar in five different schools. We teach it three days in the office and we do an outreach program at Sacred Heart Church. If you want to learn fiddle and guitar, it's free. We'll give you a little meal. We'll teach you how to jig. That's part of the culture.
In Aboriginal Week we set up our teepee and our aboriginal tent at all these schools, and we bring our jiggers. We have the world champion junior jiggers out of our office--and they jig.
We do a lot of that cultural stuff to get the kids interested.
Liberal
Anita Neville Liberal Winnipeg South Centre, MB
I just want to follow up with the police department and continue with Jean Crowder's question on your number one or two recommendation for the federal government.
S/Sgt Mike Bartkus
We spend 80% to 90% of our time as police officers going into people's homes. We spend an inordinate amount of money on gangs and drugs.
S/Sgt Mike Bartkus
Correct. We need to take some proactive steps. We need to look at risk and threat assessment. We need to look at safety planning and witness protection. We need to educate our members to be better police officers and understand the social complexities of some of these investigations we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. It's not like you see on TV; we spend a lot of time talking to people. We have to be prepared to listen to them and help them solve their problems.
Liberal
S/Sgt Mike Bartkus
It's a matter of resources and allocating funds to provide us with the tools and the necessary strategies to help people who are involved with family violence issues--to get in front of it so it doesn't become such a big, inordinate problem for us.
Again, it's a revolving door, a revolving cycle. There are breach issues. We spend an inordinate amount of time on these investigations and arresting people, only to find that they're released back into the community and breaching conditions continually. There are no preventative measures for the victim or the offender himself. Maybe he or she wants to make those changes. What can they do in the meantime prior to a trial, or something along those lines? The conditions that are just generalized and brought out for every case are inadequate. We have to look at it on a case-by-case basis, build upon it, and make it customized for the issues we're dealing with, for the family we're dealing with.
We are very busy. My section is very small and I need more people.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Dona Cadman
Thank you very much, Mike.
Thank you, Ms. Neville.
Now we'll go to the Conservatives and Ms. Grewal for five minutes.
Conservative
Nina Grewal Conservative Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
My question is for Jo-Anne.
I'm very proud of the work done by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Can you highlight some of the success stories for me? How has your organization provided mental health and emotional support to former students and their families?
Representative, Little Warriors
For me the biggest gap seems to be in the spirit of healing counselling program I have. There's not enough funding for front-line workers to work directly with aboriginal people who are survivors of the residential schools.
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation is slowing down now and closing things down, but we still have IAP clients who are coming to do their settlements. There's a huge gap in support for those people, with their lawyer, with their families, because the IAP process has opened up a wound and there's no support for those people. That's affecting families.
I can name several people who have not survived due to suicide. Their addictions have increased because of this wound that has opened from the IAP.
I appreciate the funding I've been given to continue to support IAP clients. I am very proud to have been a part of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. But there needs to be more support for those clients and their families, because a lot of people are being hurt out there due to this process.
Conservative
Nina Grewal Conservative Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
To each one of you, since we are dealing with this very serious problem of violence against aboriginal women, do you have any suggestions on how we can deal with this problem collectively as a society?
Representative, Little Warriors
I think there needs to be more education of front-line workers, and more money should be paid to them. It's like the family-school liaison counsellors in the schools. Even though they're first nations, they get paid very little--$30,000. So we don't get really good-quality counsellors for front-line workers.
Conservative
Community Outreach Worker, Métis Child and Family Services Society
It really needs to start in the home. It really does--giving support. Rather than removing kids, we need to work with them in the home to keep them as a unit. Once you remove the kids, you remove all of what is supposed to be traditional, keeping together. Once you remove them, basically they're no longer able to identify with our cultural background.
We're short on foster parents as it is. Aboriginal foster parents are very hard to find to carry on some of the beliefs and traditions that the kids were not taught by their parents. When they're in care, they're still able to receive that.
Executive Director, Métis Child and Family Services Society
Well, I think everybody knows what they have to do to get their act together. As workers with these families, we have to let them decide what they want to do and then support them the best way we can. I find the problem right now is that once the children are apprehended, they forget the families, and the families are allowed to do what they've been doing wrong.
The way we work in homes.... Sometimes we've got to kick butt. Sometimes you've got to sit them down and say, “Get your bloody act together. Smarten up. I'm coming back and I want to see things a little bit different.” You have to do that, because as a parent you talk that way to your children and grandchildren. You've got to be involved. I don't think they allow our communities to be involved enough. I resent people coming in and trying to tell us how to live.