A Needed Coming of Age

"It's a heartache I don't wish on anyone. Sometimes I feel powerless."
"A lot of people are so traumatized, they can't work, they can't parent, they can't see through life. My kids went through the same things."
"We still make it tough for men to feel something or admit they feel something. They've had abuse in their life, too, but big boys don't cry, eh?"
"We had warned Jonathon a year before to quit doing what he was doing. Young men think they're invincible."
"If society just gives up, what the hell will happen to the rest of us?"
Grace Lafond-Barr, 55, Aboriginal addictions and family counsellor

"Communities have to start talking about the abuses: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Those are learned behaviours and intergenerational effects of the residential schools. The whole system of being a healthy family has broken down. People have been guilted and shamed. People don't want to talk about it."
"There's a huge cost to keeping a First Nations person in jail, to keeping a First Nations person on welfare, a huge cost to continued overcrowded  housing conditions. We have to look at alternatives. It's in the best interest of everybody."
Chief Perry Bellegarde, Assembly of First Nations

"Indigenous men are much more likely to commit, to be charged with, and die as a result of murder than anyone else in Canada."
Robert Innes, Aboriginal professor, University of Saskatchewan

Professor Innes, as a member of the Cowessess First Nation has studied the overrepresentation of indigenous men both as victims and perpetrators of violence. He knows very well what the issue is capable of producing; the reinforcement of negative stereotypes relating to aboriginal men. Taking from sympathy for raising awareness of violence against indigenous women. Since aboriginal men themselves are victims of their own violence.

The moral obligation is there, and it is a demanding, heavy one, for governments and indigenous communities themselves to tackle the problems inherent in the social culture of dysfunction within aboriginal communities. First there is a need to pay attention to the direness of the situation where aboriginal women face such levels of violence. And mostly from aboriginal men.

It is too trite to state that since aboriginal men victimize themselves through perpetual heightened violence, it is little wonder that women are also their targets.

And usually, those who do the introspection tend to forgive themselves by stating time and again that how could it be otherwise, considering the trauma suffered by aboriginals at the hands of the non-aboriginal population? Blame is never self-directed inwardly, but always outwardly. As though the suffering was so deep that it alone is to blame for the fact that generations later aboriginals are incapable of restraining their self-destructive instincts.

It is as though they were the only groups of people ever to have suffered the mentally debilitating effects of mass psychosis through denial of their right to life, liberty and happiness. Their culture debauched by the interference of the white man, their wholesome way of life transformed by the influence of white culture, family life disrupted by their children being taken off to residential schools. Bypassing that many of those children were taken away from lives of neglect and abuse.

The residential schools may have done harm to many, but certainly not to all those children in whom self-discipline, social and adaptive skills were taught along with formal schooling. Those former students who recall those times as being beneficial to their later adjustment to a wider society of opportunities have had their voices stilled. It is only those who suffered abuse that must be heard.

In the 'public school' system of traditional Britain, young boys were sent far from home and often were abused.

Societal groups that suffered abuse from the majority among whom they lived have somehow managed to survive intact. Aboriginal groups throw around descriptions like 'genocide' to describe government actions relating to their past, when ethnic groups who really did suffer genocidal atrocities have managed to get on with their lives; Armenians, Jews, Ukrainians as examples; so why not aboriginals?

It's past time for aboriginal groups to put an end to blaming 'residential schools' and 'government' interference in the culture and lives of First Nations people. Clinging to the past, the dishonourable wrongs done them serves no good purpose for the future. It is time for a mature culture to become more mature in its inspiration toward its future; it owes no less to its young generation who deserve better.