Storytelling to bring healing

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LETHBRIDGE - A video project involving Elders and youth will be one step taken by the former residential school students from the Blood and Peigan reserves to begin their healing process.

The Four Worlds International Institute is in the process of securing funding from private sources to start videotaping and recording the experiences of people who attended residential schools.

The videos and interviews will serve as a record of what happened to the thousands of Native children, who were torn from their families, put into schools and stripped of their language, culture and way of life. The videos will also serve as a means to heal and create understanding with the generations that followed who, though never experiencing residential schools, experienced their effects.

"It's very much an intergenerational pain that's happened," said Phil Lane, Jr., co-ordinator of Four Worlds.

Getting the youth involved in the process, teaching them how to conduct interviews in a healing manner, is as important as recording the times during residential schools, a part of Native history that remains very much undocumented.

"I believe until the young people are able to understand what happened to their parents and grandparents, the role the residential school played, the healing that's needed won't happen," said Lane.

The abuse meted out on individuals at residential schools has seen its effects clearly in Native communities.

"It's not just individual abuse, but what happened to the whole structure of tribal relationships. It caused disunity and distrust."

Lane is hoping to have funding in place by late spring. Interviews are expected to take six to nine months to complete. The videotaped stories will only be shared with the permission of the storyteller.

The project is a collaboration between Four Worlds and the Foundation for Healing Among Nations, an organization in Tennesee.