Inuit abuse survivors welcome the healing money

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT ­ They’ve been called the “walking wounded” ­ abused children who masked their suffering and grew to adulthood in shame and anger.

Crippled by low self-esteem, unable to confront the memory of the past, some turned to booze and drugs to cope with the pain.

Though he’s one of Canada’s most prominent Inuit political leaders today, as a nine-year-old child, Jack Anawak trembled in the corridors of a church-run residential school. He wasn’t alone.

Anawak satisfied

In the early 1990s, while he was a member of Parliament for the Nunatsiaq riding, Anawak joined other former students of the Joseph Bernier school in Chesterfield Inlet to disclose and denounce abuses they suffered at the hands of Catholic brothers and teachers there more than 30 years ago.

So it was with a sense of personal satisfaction last week that Nunavut’s interim commissioner accepted the federal government’s long-awaited apology to victims of sexual and physical abuse at Canada’s residential schools.

“I look at it from the point of view that the government recognizes we went through a lot of hardship and is making a genuine effort to help those of us who went to residential schools,” Anawak said at the opening of a two-day-long Nunavut leaders’ summit in Iqaluit.

“I think I speak on behalf of many of us who worked hard to do something about the abuse.”

Community-based healing

As part of the government’s new Aboriginal Action Plan, federal Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart also announced that Ottawa has committed $350 million for “community-based healing” to deal with the legacy of abuse in the residential school system.

Former students who have already come forward with tales of abuse now hope that the government’s apology will move others to open up and begin their own healing process.

Exactly how the fund will be set up remains to be worked out between aboriginal organizations, victims’ groups and the federal government. Already though, some former Chesterfield Inlet students say they plan to meet to discuss how the money can be best spent in Nunavut.

“It’s going to be important, first of all, to have a united force of Inuit, and I think ITC (Inuit Tapirisat of Canada) is the perfect vehicle for that,” said Marius Tungilik, whose 1991 testimony before the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples first brought to light abuses at the school.

“We know, for instance, with the remoteness of the many communities and because former students are scattered all over Nunavut and outside Nunavut, it’s going to be a challenge.”

Allegations of sexual and physical abuse in Chesterfield Inlet between 1957 and 1969 became the focus of an RCMP criminal investigation and a territorial government inquiry in 1994-95, though formal charges against the perpetrators were never laid.

The revelations did, however, prompt the Bishop of the Churchill-Hudson Bay diocese to issue a formal apology to Inuit students in 1995, and the church eventually offered some compensation to abuse victims.

But not all former students who were abused have come to terms with their experience, Tungilik said. And the psychological problems associated with denial typically manifest in a range of dysfunctional “coping” behaviors, including substance abuse.

Money used at existing facilities?

Tungilik speculated that money from the healing fund might be used to expand therapeutic services at existing drug and alcohol treatment facilities in the North.

“If we can make use of existing facilities and existing programs and services, by all means we should probably be looking at those,” Tungilik said.

Dorthe Kunuk, director of the Inuusiqsiurvik treatment centre in Apex, said she would welcome a proposal for services tailored to meet the needs of abuse victims.

“The thing is right now we don’t have enough qualified people, or counsellors who are able to deal with those kind of issues in the North,” Kunuk said.

Will ITC manage the money?

Okalik Eegeesiak, ITC president, said she understands the money will be shared among three national aboriginal organizations ­ ITC, the Assembly of First Nations and the Métis National Council, and that it will be used to design a strategy for helping individuals, families and communities through the healing process.

“Strategy, to me, that implies that there will be more moneys later on for the implementation of community-based healing. That’s how I understand it,” Eegesiak said.

Jack Anawak estimates that a third of the 300 students who attended the Joseph Bernier School suffered some form of physical or sexual abuse. He hopes the bulk of the $350 million earmarked for community healing under the government’s Action Plan will go directly into treatment for the effects of that abuse.

Inuit, furthermore, are entitled to at least 10 per cent of the healing funds, he said.

“Chesterfield would be a good place to set up a new treatment facility,” he added.