Pang project offers help to troubled Inuit

SARA MINOGUE

Last fall, Pauline Plamondon, an Inuit healer from Kugluktuk, traveled to Pangnirtung to lead a three-week training session on suicide prevention for about 16 caregivers and counsellors.

It was a far cry from the way she got started as a counsellor.

“I got this training basically since I was a kid from the elders,” she says, from Kugluktuk. “It was done underground because at the time, it wasn’t allowed to be openly practiced.”

It’s not much different now, she says. “There is still a lot of resistance, but people are getting more open and educated.”

That’s certainly the case in Pangnirtung where a community group is taking steps to train four new Inuit counsellors and give help to caregivers already working in the community – both the professional kind, and the kind who become caregivers because friends and neighbors recognize their talent for helping, and come to lean on them.

“We need to take care of our caregivers and give them more tools and knowledge to help our people,” Plamondon says.

The Pujualussait Program got started about four years ago when a woman from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation traveled to Pang to tell people about money that was available for community projects.

The mayor at the time – Hezekiah Oshutiapik – asked Nancy Anilniliak if she could do something. She said yes, and pulled together a working group to start making plans, which soon announced a community meeting on the issue.

Rosie Kilabuk heard that call. Four years later, she works full-time as coordinator of a project to hold traditional skills workshops, care for local counsellors and caregivers and train four traditional Inuit counsellors.

“I lost my son that year in May 2002, so when they announced on the radio that there will be a meeting to talk about community issues and problems… after all the crying I did those months, I went to that meeting and I told them what the problems were,” Kilabuk says.

By June 2005, the group had secured $800,000 over two years, and was ready to hold a week-long planning session with 16 local caregivers and several outside facilitators.

That led to a three-week trauma and safety training course in September, for about 16 people who work with victims of abuse.

Back-to-back training sessions followed in October. A dozen people took part in a three-week suicide prevention training session with Plamondon, followed by a two-week long healing session with four facilitators from Winnipeg.

By January, the group advertised for four trainee counsellors – all of whom have now received some or all of their training from the Homewood Health Centre in Ontario.

The next part of the training program is to tackle the subject of sexual abuse. Plamondon will return to Pang to lead that session this summer.

Kilabuk said the group has made a huge difference in the community.

“Even for myself. I don’t think I would be here… it’s hard to say where I would be without the project,” Kilabuk said.

Meeka Alivaktuk, a school community counsellor, is now the chair of the committee.

She was just nine years old when she was taken from an outpost camp outside of Pang and sent to a residential school. Getting involved in the healing process was a dream of hers.

Of the training workshops, she says “the community needs those kinds of people.”

“Not only for the residential school victims,” she says, “but for anyone who needs help. A lot of families have issues.”

She describes several other activities the group has started – caribou sewing workshops and a fashion show, storytelling on the radio, tool-making workshops for young men, and building a cabin on the land about 15 miles out of town.

That cabin, located at Sannurit, could be the site of future retreats or workshops, or just wholesome family camping. It has three bedrooms and a large living area, and is in a popular camping spot.