Community members learn how to help in crisis situations

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No one wants to think about a crisis happening in his or her community, but not thinking about it won't stop it from happening. Now, thanks to some forward thinking, there are 40 people on Big River First Nation who are prepared to help if a crisis does come their way.

The 40 community members are part of a crisis team formed on the First Nation. The team members are all certified in crisis intervention, having completed Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) training at the end of January.

The members of the team completed the basic CISM training, which gives participants the skills they need to handle crisis situations, from providing on-scene support services, to defusing potential crisis situations, to dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. They also completed peer support training, which helped them develop the communications skills needed when offering one on one support to people in crisis situations.

The program also had an added feature not usually included in the CISM training package- week-long cultural component.

Lyle Whitefish, tribal chief for Agency Chief Tribal Council, was involved in bringing the training to Big River, and in developing the cultural content.

"The main thrust behind the cultural component is to have people, we wanted them to heal themselves first before they can attempt to try and heal others. And we had our resource people from our area here, as well as from our neighboring First Nations, come in and talk about four key areas."

Those areas covered included sharing and self-healing, parenting, the importance of spirituality, and alcohol and drug abuse. A sweatlodge ceremony was also held each evening.

Now that the first group of people has been trained and certified, work will begin to train another 40 people in Pelican Lake and Witchekan Lake, Whitefish said.

"So all together there'll be 80 people trained to respond to a crisis situation."

The participants in the first round of training were those "who were genuinely interested in assisting people in a counselling situation," Whitefish said.

Front line staff that are likely to encounter crisis situations were also encouraged to take part in the training, including school guidance counsellors who might have to deal with suicides or attempted suicides, and people who often have to try to provide support when there is a death in a family.

"So it was just a wide range of people that felt that they needed the training so they can continue helping," Whitefish said.

The idea of creating a community-based crisis team grew out of the tribal council's desire to have people in place to provide support and counselling for people who had suffered abuse in residential schools. The program was made possible through funding from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

"And we are in the process of putting a 24-hour crisis line for people," Whitefish added, "because we've also had, last year we had five suicide attempts at the high school. And that's why we thought that this program would be beneficial to defuse some of that, and to assist students on a continuous basis.

"We are from the community, and we're there to help whoever needs, even just marriage counselling, grieving and loss. We've had a few deaths here just recently, and we weren't trained during that time, but we're now able to assist people in the area of grief," he said.

"I'm very proud of the outcome," Whitefish said of the initial training program. "There were 40 people there, they were all certified and they were there every day from 9 until 5, taking the training, and I want to let the entire community know how proud we are of our system."