Inuit everywhere need trauma counselling

Picture this: you and your family are told to move to a new place to where other families are living, whom you don’t know, and everything changes.

You are not allowed to travel as you used to from one place to another.

You are separated from your extended family to relocate from a place where you know the hunting grounds, to where you receive family support.

Later, your children are taken away from you to residential school. You have no choice. You miss your children, not knowing how your children are doing.

Your dogs, who are main survival tool, who take you home safely, bring you to where hunting is good, who help while traveling with your family, are then killed.

This is what happens to every family in each community, like a genocide, with one thing happening after another in a short period of time.

Some of our parents and grandparents were born in igloos not so long ago.

But most are done in by the government’s role in colonization, relocations, residential schools and dog slaughtering, along with other untold events that have affected us Inuit.

Then, when alcohol becomes available during the 1960s and 1970s most adults start drinking alcohol at home, or with friends in public places, and you never really know what is going to happen, but you know what is coming.

There is nowhere to go, no one to talk to.

Everyday violence related to alcohol occurs in your home, with your friends and in public.

The vulnerable are abused and most children are abused and neglected, especially those children where both parents are alcoholics.

Now in our community we are facing children being taken away from our homes to foster homes — basically the same thing that happened when our older sisters and brothers were sent to residential schools.

There are young parents drinking and drugging, children with no meals to eat. There’s no curfew, school isn’t important.

People are losing loved ones from suicide or from alcohol-related deaths.

Fathers are being sent to jail in Amos and St. Jerôme for spousal abuse and other criminal charges.

Young teenagers are sent to youth group homes. They are diagnosed with mental disorders, but are not really treated. Youth come back home where little help is provided to parents, to their families where problems remain the same.

Life isn’t easy living in communities where every family is affected by addiction.

Having been traumatized in childhood, experienced tragic events, losses from unexpected deaths, it’s easier not to feel, not to remember, to self-medicate by using, and continue to use in communities where addiction isn’t understood.

This shows how we need treatment training centres and family centres.

We need to understand about addictions, legal and illegal drugs and alcohol, understanding what they are and what they do to each family member.

We need to understand how regular counseling with individuals, couples and families with addiction is a vital need and would benefit families.

We need more than band-aid treatment, where our counsellors don’t get appropriate training in family addictions and trauma related to addiction.

There is a desperate need for treatment centres in each community and an addiction training centre, operating in Inuttitut.

These centres would specialize in training for counselling to addicts, spouses, children, and adult children of alcoholics as well as traumas, triggers, relapses, coping skills, co-dependency, characteristics of addiction and alcoholic households, personality characteristics of children and adult children of alcoholics, and would also focus on every family member, whether a child, teenager, elder or a friend.

Our organizations are facing deficits from the high costs produced by alcohol and drug-related crimes, deaths, accidents, children’s removal from homes, spousal abuse, travel, shelters, hospitals, medivacs and numerous related to alcohol and drugs.

Other major problems include the lack of housing, the overcrowding of families living together and the resulting chaos, which is another contributor to violence, and that lack of jobs, especially in this region where the cost of living is high.

Yes, we do have a few treatment centres which deal with individuals who go to treatment without family members being treated.

But if we don’t look at the cause of addictions, which are major contributors to neglect, abuse, deaths, domestic violence and accidents, communities won’t have the appropriate treatment for families. This will lead to another cycle of addiction, which will continue from one generation to the next.

I’m Inuk. My father used to talk about how he guided non-Inuit with his dog teams when qallunaat had to be taken to his destination.

One time my dad took a wounded, sick qallunaq by his dog team for medical treatment.

There are a lot of untold stories of how our people contributed to making Canada and Quebec, how our ancestors helped early explorers who didn’t know how to survive in a cold harsh land and helped non-Inuit by sharing meals, clothing and shelter.

Now the time is here when, as Inuit fathers and mothers, Inuit in every community need to come together and start talking about we need drug and alcohol centres, based in our own culture, committed to holistic healing, and supporting addiction-free healthy lifestyles.

We want our children and the next generation not to suffer anymore by remaining silent and numb. We have suffered enough.

We are responsible for our lives and our children in our communities; together we can take a step forward for better future and for our children.

(Name withheld by request)
Nunavik

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