Around 40 youth participated in a forum recently to learn about colonization of First Nations in Canada and the formation of residential schools.
The brainchild of Lake City Secondary First Nations role model Dallas George, the forum grew out of a reconciliation group that meets at lunch time at the school.
“We planned this forum for us to gain a better understanding of what First Nations people have gone through,” George said. “Some of the kids at our school don’t know about our past history.”
Warren Hooley, came up from Vancouver to facilitate the event.
George said they chose Hooley because he works with IndigenEYEZ, an organization committed to encouraging communities to explore their own cultures and think deeply about what traditional values mean in the contemporary world.
“We’ve heard good things about him,” George said of Hooley.
Hooley described the reality for First Nations living in Canada as “pretty intense” and showed a slide on the overhead screen citing recent statistics.
Sobering facts showed Indigenous Canadians are at the bottom of most socio-economic indicators and over-represented in the number of high school dropouts, unemployment rates, poverty and involvement in the criminal justice system.
The national average of suicide for Indigenous youth is five to six times the national average and self-inflicted harm is the leading cause of death of Indigenous people, and Indigenous women experience the highest rate of violence.
“How did we get to this point at Indigenous people,” Hooley asked the youth. “Why are there still missing and murdered Indigenous women. Why are we living in developing third world conditions in a first world country?”
Hooley said Europe was expanding quickly and there were inner conflicts with people being mistreated.
“They wanted to flee and a lot of colonization was happening in Europe, and a really common one was in Ireland. Ireland was completely colonized by England and the processes they learned to basically exterminate the Irish culture, they took them and applied them to North America.”
Taking away a person’s culture and breaking their spirit, were techniques they used, he added.
Esk’etemc elders Irene and Fred Johnson shared their life stories with the youth, which included sexual, physical and substance abuse.
Both of them have worked steadily on healing and recovery with their community for more than 30 years.
“Healing and recovery is difficult,” Irene told the students.
“If you see people who are sober and being successful they are lucky. Some have said they’d rather die before they talk about what happened to them. Some of them need to drink a little bit every day to survive.”
Fred talked about their cultural tradition being the strength for his own healing from 13 years of addiction and past trauma.
“We were taken from our mom and dad and put in dorms with 50 children,” Fred recalled. “When we ate there were 100 boys like in an army camp. For us it was very unnatural.”
Krista Harvey with the Boys and Girls Club of Williams Lake and District met with George’s group on planning the forum, but she credited the youth with being the made leaders.
“It was completely youth organized,” Harvey said.