Smoking-pack it in this year

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The Alberta Lung Association says that 85 per cent of lung cancer is caused by cigarette smoking and that smoking contributes to other cancers as well, such as cancer of the mouth and pancreas. Heart disease and stroke are also diseases that smokers have to worry about.

So, as part of National Non-smoking Week, the Nechi Training Research and Health Promotions Institute worked with the community of Edmonton to celebrate Weedless Wednesday, with more than 70 people gathered in the institute's gymnasium on Jan. 22 to hear as guest speakers talk about a number of issues related to smoking, including the spiritual use of tobacco, the struggles of quitting smoking, and surviving throat cancer.

Lisa Hinks, project co-ordinator at Nechi, said that this event, the first ever on the topic for the institute, was interesting and informative.

"I think that it went really well and I think that people did benefit from the information and the stories that were shared. We had people ask us questions, especially after the whole event was over. They told me that they were trying to quit and [asked] what are some of the things that they could do to help them stop aside from what they heard and everything. It was interesting."

Elder Emil Durocher spoke about the traditional use of tobacco in the Aboriginal community. He said that people seem to think that smoking and traditional ceremonies are the same thing, but stressed that they are not.

"In the mid-1900s, Elders did not smoke the tobacco. When they did their ceremonies, they would put the tobacco on the ground. This was how the tobacco was used. It was only in the past 50 years that tobacco has been really abused. The tobacco that we use now is not the tobacco that the Elders used then. The tobacco they use now is toxic. They put so many ingredients in the cigarettes today, it is not the sacred tobacco that we used to use," he said.

People are not supposed to smoke every day, said Derocher.

"Actually, in the Native tradition, we are not supposed to take in anything that is harmful to our bodies. If we want to be a clean person, we have to start to clean our bodies and our mind so that our spirit can be as clean as the Creator wants it to be. Our bodies were given to us by the Creator so that we could honor our bodies in this lifetime and that we won't harm ourselves in any way so that we could give our bodies back to the Creator the same way, as clean as they were in the beginning. I think that smoking does a lot of harm," he said.

"Quitting smoking is actually a good thing, because it was never meant for us to smoke the kinds of cigarettes today. I think there is going to have to be a lot of restructuring around the use of tobacco, the way it is used in ceremonial purposes," he said.

Russell Auger performed a traditional tobacco ceremony in which the audience was asked to participate. Each member was given a small amount of tobacco to place over his or her heart while bowing his or her head in prayer. Auger said that at one time Aboriginal people used tobacco in this way.