Healing Foundation gives $120,000 to Cape Dorset victims’ group

SEAN MCKIBBON
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT — A self-help group in Cape Dorset plans to use $120,000 it received from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation to offer psychological counseling to male victims of sexual and physical abuse.

“There are so many men who had been victims of sexual abuse that need help,” Kanayuk Salomonie, leader of a local women’s group, said.

The money will be used to establish a men’s healing group and expand counseling services to women and depressed teens, too, she said.

Ever since the death of her husband Joanasie in 1998, Salomonie said there has been no one in the community able to lead a men’s group for abuse survivors.

Salomonie said the grant will enable Cape Dorset to bring instructors to the community to teach people how to counsel each other. She said she hopes new leaders for the men’s group will be found.

“We do counseling to those who need help through the court and sometimes we have to attend the court. We had offenders joining us in our healing program,” said Salomonie.

Salamonie’s group counsels women that were abused in institutions in the South during the 1950s and 60s, but the group says many young men from the community were sexually assaulted while attending school in the 1980s.

The Cape Dorset project was one of 35 that the Aboriginal Healing Foundation promised funding to this week. In total, the AHF will pay $2 million to various groups helping the survivors of sexual and physical abuse suffered at the hands of teachers in Canada’s church-run residential schools.

It was the first of three rounds of funding for 1999 and only included project proposals that had been submitted to the AHF by January 15 under the theme of “Community Therapeutic Healing and Developing and Enhancing Aboriginal Capacity.”

This means most of the projects deal with education initiatives for the healing groups, said AHF spokesman Allen Gabriel. Upcoming rounds will deal with healing centre proposals and with “honour and history,” he said.

Cape Dorset was the only Nunavut community to receive funding in this round, but that does not mean it will be the only group in Nunavut to get funding.

Residential school survivors from Chesterfield Inlet have put together a proposal that was to be submitted for the third round of funding this year, said Simeonie Kunnuk, a community liaison officer for Inuit Tapirisat of Canada.

Kunnuk, who has been working with the survivors group, would not go into detail about what the proposal contains.