Atleo, now a robust 43-year-old, grew up believing that living past age 29 would be a great accomplishment. Half of his contemporaries in the village are dead, most of them through suicide, accident or other forms of violent death. In 2005, Atleo, then a young regional chief, testified about the crisis in Ahousaht before a Senate committee studying mental health issues. In six months that year, there were 60 suicide attempts in a band of 1,800, only half of whom lived on the reserve. “People in their mid-fifties and children as young as eight are attempting and committing suicide,” he told senators.
Atleo says the community suffers “post-traumatic stress,” the legacy of the residential school system and of the Indian Act. “We’re dealing with a 100-year assault on our people. It’s just an outright assault on identity, on the fabric of family, on culture, our society, our government systems, our practice of spirituality, on our laws,” he says. “What is required, not just in my village but more broadly,” he says, “is that First Nations jurisdiction over justice be recognized.”
Ahousaht’s treatment plan took a year to develop. A budget of about $100,000 was cobbled together from various sources, including the Residential Schools Healing Project, aided by many volunteers. There was a psychologist; a doctor and nurses helped people through withdrawal. There were visits from family, and a heavy cultural component. There were sweat lodges and cleansing ceremonies. Some learned skills they’d lost or never had, like hunting ducks, or field-dressing deer. They carved masks and paddles. They made drums. They sang. They danced. They raged. They took “medicine walks” in the green cathedral of the forest. A group of Christian musicians came from Port Hardy. “Some of our people are Christians, they lean in that direction,” says Dave Frank. That was okay, too, he says.
“There’s no wrong way to pray.”
They listened to band member Milton Sam share his story—a man who has spent 6½ of his 42 years in federal and provincial prisons, for “drinking and drugging,” Sam says, and otherwise causing havoc.
Parole conditions, not band edicts, twice saw him banished from Ahousaht. He would sneak back, regardless, not having much regard for “European law,” he admits. The prison system did offer him two treatment programs. It was there he confronted his past. He was sexually assaulted as a boy of seven, he says. Acknowledging this didn’t prevent him slipping back to drink, drugs and the general chaos of his life. Then, in June 2009, after he was released from jail yet again, his family, with the support of the traditional law keepers and the health care team, presented an ultimatum. He was being sent to an isolated island nearby to sort himself out. He could go voluntarily, or be dragged there, but he was going.
He went voluntarily. There, rising before dawn, he would wade into the frigid ocean, screaming out his pain. “This whole bag of emotions and feelings I carried my whole life. That’s what I was washing away.” It has been more than a year now. He is lighter, happier and sober, he says. He volunteers at the health centre where Dave Frank works. A judge has lifted his parole conditions. All this he shared with the people at Sydney Inlet. “They were given a choice,” he says, “to go and get help or be banished. I ask myself what I would want. Would I want my community? Would I want my family? Would I want the people—or would I want to leave?”
It has been three months since all 32 members of Ahousaht reintegrated into the community. Even those who’d refused treatment backed away from a court challenge. A couple have left the community for addiction programs elsewhere, and Frank says the others—spurred on by the graduates of Sydney Inlet—will head to the camp this fall. Until then, the banishment order is on hold.
Atleo returned to his home village in early June after three residents and a pilot died in a float-plane crash. He, too, noticed a changed atmosphere despite the profound sense of loss. “It just feels like people’s chins are up a little more,” he says. “That confidence is beginning to return to people.” And Preston of the RCMP is guardedly optimistic. “In the short term I think it’s certainly helped the community. The real test will be to stay on top of it,” he says.
Chief Frank, who has a poetic turn of phrase, sees his community as a budding rose. “We’ve gone through hell but above the stem and the gall-darn thorns we’re becoming a rose,” he says. “It feels good to be able to see that.” His brother Dave uses less flowery language. He is pleased and relieved that those who were sent away were not cast adrift. In a nod to the past, they returned home by canoe. “They made their own paddles,” he says. And that made all the difference.
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