Claim healing, women say

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Some Hamilton area Metis women are partnering with the Aboriginal Healing Foundation this spring in a project to move people past the traumatic events in their lives and on to a new emotional start.

The group running the project, which will include a June 14-15 gathering at Niagara Regional Native Centre in Niagara-On-The-Lake, is the Metis Women's Circle. Founder and president Elize Hartley said the women's circle developed when a few women broke away from another, larger Metis organization to form an organization in which women's concerns could be heard and better appreciated.

Their June narrative project and gathering is entitled Silent Memories: Our Place in the World (2003). It aims to pick up where previous projects that explored the effects of intergenerational trauma among Aboriginal people left off.

Three previous women's circle projects from 1999 up to this year dealt with intergenerational trauma within Metis communities. Each project identified generations of Metis people who have suffered from poverty, depression, substance abuse, lack of education and proper housing, nutritional problems, anger management problems, and child neglect and abuse.

This new project means to identify ways to overcome these problems.

Sandi Warren, who teaches Human Resources part-time in Humber College's Public Administration Program, is the project co-ordinator. She says the project will identify and examine both traditional and Western healing models, in keeping with what she describes as "a Metis perspective." They will draw on Medicine Wheel teachings and call upon the wisdom of a variety of traditional healers as well as mainstream ones.

Warren hopes the project will have the benefit of "reconnecting some folks to those traditional models."

She said Metis and urban Aboriginal people who had to move away from the reserves were separated from and "lost touch with some of the traditions."

Warren admits that she falls into that category too. Her grandfather was Seneca from New York State, she said, but "I don't know much about my culture."

Warren added that the Metis Women's Circle recognizes that many Metis people have been raised with and are only familiar with Western healing models. They therefore "struggle with adopting traditional models right away."

She said they'll be asking whether there are "any ways to bridge and draw on familiarity, so that people can actually see that [traditional methods are] not too foreign to them."

That is why they will look at both traditional and current, modern healing models in therapies "that people are being drawn towards, such as naturopathy, herbology, massage therapy, physiotherapy."

Warren said they want to find out "what are people being drawn towards, and how much do they know about it?"

Teachers and healers from the Niagara Regional Native Centre, the Hamilton Native Centre, Six Nations, and Brantford's Woodland Cultural Centre will attend, and a few will be drawn from Walpole Island and Parry Sound region.

Lee Maracle will be one of them. Maracle has a home in Barrie but Warren believes she currently lives in the state of Washington and spends time in Vancouver.

"Her gift is actually around telling traditional story and sort of reconnecting people to songs or stories or traditions that were part of a healing method." For example, at a previous workshop Warren attended, Maracle taught them a mourning song, through which they learned how to release emotion.

"It was very powerful."

Geraldine Standup from Kahnawake also is confirmed as a presenter, and she will be available for one-on-one care. Standup is known as a healer who deals with "the cross-cultural issues that sort of are facing Aboriginal people in trying to decide how to address some of their illnesses," said Warren. "For instance, the issues around diabetes, and how do we stop the generational propensity for Aboriginal people to have diabetes."

Dr. Dawn Hill from McMaster University, who is immersedin the local community and is familiar with issues of intergenerational trauma, will bring a forward-thinking message.

"Her message will be, 'OK, we've been victims long enough, so now let's start demanding our healing practices the way we want them.'"

Warren said the final person they have invited to speak is Karen McNaughton.

"She will be sharing with folks seasonal medicines. So because it will be June, it will be the Strawberry teachings that she will share."

Warren added that McNaughton also has expertise working with children and will be teaching children how to reconnect to their Aboriginal roots through the drum or through the many levels of story.

"Her message for the women will be, 'When you hear the drum and when you hear these stories they will touch you at a genetic level that you won't quite understand . . . but it's because of your Aboriginal roots."

For more information about the healing gathering, contact Sandi Warren by phone or fax at 905-634-5270, or by e-mail at stnd-rock@sympatico.ca.