Holistic approach needed to heal trauma in Inuit communities, says Pauktuutit president

Pauktuutit is holding its annual general meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 25, and Wednesday, Feb. 26, in Ottawa, at which time it will release its full report on how the police respond to gendered violence in Inuit Nunangat.

Pauktuutit is a national organization that calls itself the “voice of Inuit women in Canada.” It released a preliminary report on the study’s findings in January, along with 15 recommendations.

The organization invited an RCMP commissioner to attend its AGM to be involved in the discussions about the report and its findings. The RCMP hasn’t responded to a query from Nunatsiaq News about whether it will send a representative to the meeting.

“Some of the trust has been lost, from way back, the trust between RCMP and the people,” said Rebecca Kudloo, the president of Pauktuutit, in a phone interview from her home in Baker Lake.

“For some women, when they call for help, maybe their experience was not good, dealing with the RCMP, so they might be hesitant to call again.”

Kudloo said everyone already knows what the issues are, and the report is an attempt to create a framework to decolonize policing in the North.

The report makes 15 recommendations. They include teaching the police about the history, culture and language of the communities they’re stationed in, hiring more female officers, striking community advisory committees composed of elders and community leaders, having police stay in communities for longer than one or two years, and having the RCMP hire Inuit locally to act as interpreters.

One recommendation, to have Inuktut-speaking dispatchers hired to be available to answer calls at any time of day or night, is already being addressed in Nunavut, where MLAs have allocated money in the 2020-21 operational budget to hire four dispatchers, so someone is available to answer the phone in Inuktut 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Nunavut justice of the peace Joseph Murdoch-Flowers wrote a decision in early February, saying the RCMP should not arrest women if they have been drinking when they call for help, when their drinking breaks the conditions of their bail, because this will prevent women from calling for help in the future.

Pauktuutit wrote a public statement in support of Murdoch-Flowers’ decision—“Because we all know women are murdered up North, usually in their homes, because they have no place to go,” Kudloo said, explaining why Pauktuutit chose to publicly support the judgment.

“There’s a lot of need for healing,” Kudloo said. “People tend to turn to alcohol—I’m not making excuses for anyone who does that—but we all know that people use alcohol to forget, or sometimes numb themselves.”

That needs to be addressed by providing counselling and support for people who have addictions or are violent, to heal the underlying trauma that many need to acknowledge, Kudloo said.

“We look at things holistically as Inuit,” she said. “We can’t just solve one part of the problem.”

In Baker Lake, Kudloo helped to start a community-based counselling service in an attempt to create avenues for people to heal—from violence, poverty and sexual abuse—and now she is the chair of the organization that runs the counselling centre.

“I personally fight for community-based counselling services in each community,” Kudloo said.

She said it often doesn’t work to bring up counsellors or therapists from the south who have no idea about family dynamics or the community’s history.

“People need to be counselled in the language they choose,” Kudloo said. “If you have trauma, your own language is going to come out.”

As with RCMP members frequently cycling through communities every few years, Kudloo points out that this is a problem with counsellors and social workers, too, saying that people get tired of telling their story again every time someone new is in town. This prevents them from going forward in their healing.

Along with providing shelter for people, often women and children, who are the experiencing violence and abuse, and creating services that allow them to heal from this, Kudloo says that men and boys need to be able to acknowledge and heal from their trauma.

When Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, a well-known filmmaker, tweeted about being sexually assaulted by Johnny Issaluk, a well-known actor and athlete, Kudloo and Pauktuutit did not make any public statement in support of Arnaquq-Baril, even after other Inuit leaders did stand up to say they believe women with stories of abuse.

Kudloo said that Pauktuutit “doesn’t name individuals. We’ll say what he did was wrong, of course.”

“It takes a lot of courage for a woman to say, you know, who their abusers are,” Kudloo said.

Pauktuutit’s role, Kudloo said, is to lobby all levels of government for money to address ongoing problems holistically.

Women are emboldened to speak up, Kudloo said, because of the Me Too movement. But she said that the North needs to catch up with the movement.

“If they’re disclosing more, then we need more programs,” she said. “What do you do when there’s no services up North to deal with it?”

Pauktuutit says on its website that violence and abuse prevention has been its top priority since 1984. Kudloo said it takes more than a year to heal from trauma, and that healing is essential to stopping more men from perpetuating violence and sexual abuse.

That’s why she says that going to the root of the problem is essential: tackling the history of abuse in communities, creating avenues for victims and offenders to come forward and heal, and ensuring police in communities understand that history as well.

Along with, hopefully, having this dialogue with the RCMP at its AGM, Pauktuutit will appoint new board members and discuss its priorities for the year ahead.