That's my job, hey?
My name is Jo-Anne Hansen. I'm a registered social worker and I own a little company called The Spirit of Healing. I'm here to represent Little Warriors. Little Warriors is an organization that's pretty new, and it's to support victims of sexual abuse.
I'm from northern Alberta. My father was Carl Frank Hansen-Halcrow, and my grandmother was Sarah Halcrow. I'm passionate about this work because of where she came from. My grandmother married my grandfather when she was very young, 16 years old, when she was stripped of her treaty status. She was beaten pretty much until she died at 47 years old. I'm here to represent my heritage. I'm first nations, Métis, myself.
Seven minutes isn't very long, so I have only two things to address that I've learned from my counselling with residential school victims--because that's what I do. One is codependency. Codependency is the key and probably worst effect of residential schools, because children were forced to keep the peace just to survive. It doesn't surprise me that there's so much abuse in aboriginal communities because of that. The other key that's important is bullying. I learned a long time ago that the only way to protect yourself against others is to know yourself well enough so that others can't use you against yourself.
I wanted to make an impact from a traditional perspective using my music, so I wrote this song to address that. There will be little bits and pieces where you'll see that I imagine my grandmother being beaten and then trying to figure out how she was going to survive the next day. I wrote this song for that.
Bear with me. I've never done this before in public--not this way, anyway. But it's very important to me, so I'll take a few chances and see what happens:
In the night after I wake up,
And feel the teardrops in my eyes,
For a moment I am startled,
What's in dreams that made me cry?
So I crash through the shadows,
Stumble through the empty halls
Turn the radio on softly
I want to make sense of it all.
Call into the night, hear the voices.
Hurting image on the wall.
Each is my memories, echoing I am nothing at all.
The images are scaring me, like I have no control.
Don't forget they are just shadows; they don't have any power at all!
So I crash through the shadows,
Stumble through the empty halls
Try to find a warm steady heart beat,
In the cold, steel concrete walls
The steel guitar is screaming
Stings the center of my soul
Overwhelmed that I am not dreaming, fighting my way to stand up tall.
The struggle is drowning a voice of reason;
The tears are me believing
That all this is me! “Realizing,” that it “Really, isn't me, at all!!!”
So I crash through the shadows,
Stumble through the empty halls
Turn the radio on softly
I want to make sense of it all.
Then the voice starts with humming, harmony to my soul
Resonating a common moment as she takes my hand in her palm.
Saying, “It's not your home, not your friends nor your lover,
The truth is it's in your song.”
“We all need a little help.
When our walk feels like a crawl!!!”
I'm not crazy, I am healing and can rise above despair!
This is real and I'm not dreaming!
The truth is, “I really care!”
I'm not crazy, I am healing and can rise above despair!
The tears are real, and I'm not dreaming
The truth is, “I really care!”