Workshop to promote understanding and coping

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Understanding both Natives and non-Natives and creating stronger family units is what the upcoming workshop "Parenting children of survivors of the residential school experience" is all about.

"With so many of the Native people taken away from their families and put in residential schools, they ended up not being able to parent," said Sharon

Herman-Loran, administrator for the Family Studies Program at the Lethbridge Community College. "Their families have never functioned the way they should."

Before joining the college, Herman-Loran was a community nurse and worked with Native people on reserves throughout Alberta. Through first hand experience she came to understand the effect residential schooling had on Native family life.

Four years ago, a Native member of her Family Studies Advisory Committee identified a need for educating people on residential schooling and its impact. Herman-Loran, a non-Native, readily agreed. The result was a one-day workshop in 1997 with more than 220 people filling the hall to capacity in Lethbridge. Expanding on the need identified and the work begun, Herman-Loran managed to get Seven Generations Institute for Training and Development to agree to put on a workshop in Lethbridge, Oct. 26 to 29.

But with funding tight, the workshop has to be delivered on a cost recovery basis - a cost of $856. It's high, said Herman-Loran, but not as costly as travelling to Armstrong, B.C., where Seven Generations is located, to take the course there. Numerous inquiries regarding the workshop have been received from Manitoba west.

Two Native facilitators will be leading participants through a number of areas: identifying the background and history of residential schools; getting Native people to feel pride in their heritage and themselves; and then giving strategies that can be used to improve their situations in parenting.

It doesn't start with the children who attended residential schools; it starts with their parents. Without the children at home on a continuous basis, families lost their closeness and parenting skills diminished. Then when residential school children became parents themselves, they had no parenting skills to call on. In turn, their children became parents and also had no parenting skills.

"I see this workshop as four days that will affirm the worth, value, respect we have for families of all cultures and reaffirm that children are the way of the future and through enhanced parenting skills children will find a pathway to the future," she said.

Anyone interested in attending the four-day workshop is asked to contact Herman-Loran at (403) 320-3314 as soon as possible. If there is not a minimum of 16 registrants, the workshop will be cancelled.