Hollow Water healing: straightforward, honest

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A healing movement that has roots in British Columbia has successfully taken hold in Hollow Water, Man. and is reaching to other parts of the country.

Valdie Seymour and Berma Bushie are two of the founders of what is called community holistic circle healing in Hollow Water, a First Nation of 700 people on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg.

It's a process that has successfully been used to deal with dozens of cases of sexual abuse. Eighty-four sexual abuse victims and 48 offenders have benefited from the circle healing in Hollow Water during the past 10 years. Nine out 10 offenders are taking responsibility for their actions and the pain they have caused, and seldom re-offend, said Bushie. Now others want to know how it's done.

At the invitation of the Kenora Anishinabe Kweg Aboriginal Women's Organization, Seymour and Bushie recently travelled to northwestern Ontario to speak of their experiences to more than 100 people at a four-day conference.

Conference participants included delegates from 20 First Nations between the Manitoba border and Garden River First Nation near Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. along with social service, health and justice system workers.

It's a process Seymour's already shared with at least 50 First Nations.

"The problem is just so big," he said after arriving in Kenora from Quebec. More help is on the way, though. Sixteen others in Hollow Water are in their second year of a college accredited training program that will prepare them as holistic workers who know how to build teams and communities, Seymour said.

Bushie said Hollow Water's vision includes two basic values that sustained Hollow Water families in the past: children are looked upon as gifts from the Creator and women have a place of honor because the Creator has given them the gift of bringing life into the world.

The other key element was the four basic laws of the Anishinabe - honesty, kindness, sharing and respect.

In the mid-1980s, Hollow Water discovered a solution in the power of healing circles, beginning with a resource team of 24, the members of which openly shared their painful personal stories with each other.

A confidential survey in a workshop of 60 community members indicated that two-thirds of the participants had been sexually victimized as children, youth or adults, and one-third had sexually victimized others.

Bushie, a victim of incest and rape by the time she was 12, came to realize the silence regarding abuse would have to be broken if she wanted her community to live its vision.

"I lived in silence around these issues until I was 38," she said. "I came to know that the dynamics of silence in my community kept me from having a good life. I couldn't practise the laws of the Creator while I was trapped in that silence and rage."

The resource team heard its first sexual abuse disclosure from a child less than two years later, in 1996.

In search of help, 20 community members travelled to Alkali Lake, B.C. in 1988. By this time, Alkali Lake was renowned for having turned around an adult population of which 95 per cent were said to be abusing alcohol to the point where 95 per cent were considered "recovering" alcoholics.

When the Hollow Water group returned from Alkali Lake, it conducted a week-long stretch of workshops to share personal stories about victimization. Soon, there was a flood of 17 disclosures from children of current abuse cases.

"They were disclosing on uncles, aunts, grandfathers. It was a scary time for the community," Bushie remembers. As a child care worker, she was faced with the scary prospect of having to bring half of Hollow Water's child population into the care of its child welfare agency. Half of the adult population could have been reported to the criminal justice system.

"We felt such actions would escalate things, not bring order," she explained. "If you're an offender, the system will protect you every step of the way. The courts will do everything in their power to rip the victim part to support your lie."

The offender, though, is faced with the prospect of jail, where, Bushie said, healing is unlikely.

Instead, Hollow Water concentrated on setting up an alternative. Two teams were formed, one to sit in circles with the victim, another for the offender, along with their respective families. Eventually, the two groups are brought together in a larger healing circle, and later a sentencing circle that also involves community members and the usual players that would be found in a court setting.

"Victims need to get out of the trap of shame and guilt and. . . hear they're supported and celebrated for the things they've brought into the open," said Bushie.

Rupert Ross, an assistant Crown attorney in Kenora who travelled to Hollow Water as part of a three-year Aboriginal Justice Directorate project and wrote about it in his book Returning to the Teachings, knows the circles have a profound effect on the offenders.

"I heard a woman say 20 years after being abused that she still feels so dirty that she can't have her grandchild sit on her knee because she doesn't want to contaminate him or that she can't stand to look at herself in the mirror," he said. "Statements like that have immense power over an offender because the truth is part of healing. Our justice system doesn't operate at that spiritual, emotional level."

Bushie calls it a straightforward process that operates out of honesty. "There are no bargains of 'You do this and we'll do that.' Our way is not easy. To be honest is difficult."