Sense of identity core to healing from trauma in prison populations

Having culturally-relevant programming to deal with trauma is “extremely important” for many Indigenous inmates, who lack a sense of identity, said Travis Gabriel, a Mohawk Elder and helper at Waseskun Healing Centre.

“Not knowing, not having a belief system … gave them that fearless, hopeless feeling, no direction. It speaks to identity all the way. You have to know who you are in order to know who you want to be, what you’ve become.”

But the role played by the nine healing lodges associated with Corrections Services Canada is limited. The alternative form of incarceration is available only to minimum security male inmates, and minimum and medium security females.

A report tabled in the House of Commons Thursday by Howard Sapers, correctional investigator of Canada, indicated that Aboriginal inmates are more likely to be classified as maximum security.

Waseskun Healing Centre is the only lodge east of Manitoba associated with Corrections Services Canada. It is one of five lodges that operate under Section 81 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. CSC directly operates the other four lodges.

Offenders must stay at Waseskun Healing Centre, which accepts only men, for a minimum of six months.

“For some at six months, we’re only just scratching the surface,” said Gabriel. “If we really look at understanding a life-time of pain or abuse or any other kind of issue … it takes quite an amount of time to do that.”

Gabriel, who has been at Waseskun for five years, says the provincial system regularly implements a six-month stay and “we’ve had quite a few of our people who have come back into the system… only to realize, ‘I’ve only just scratched the surface. I should have gone deeper. I should have made a little stronger effort to correct things because when I went home, I wasn’t ready.’”

Waseskun guides the men in examining themselves, at why it is they hurt, and why it is they hurt others.

“We look at the person as a whole, at the abuses that they had in their life and how it’s shaped them to be who they are,” said Glenda Mayo, a helper.

For many, the hurt is multi-generational “and that’s an enormous story to go through,” said Mohawk Elder Dennis Nicholas, who heads the close-knit team with Mayo and Gabriel.

Not all inmates are ready or willing to take that painful, intense journey.

Waseskun Elders visits about 20 correctional facilities in Ontario and Quebec to tell the men about the healing centre and to ask them to consider it as an alternative form of incarceration. While they visit the correctional facilities, they also hold healing circles, perform ceremonies, and work with inmates one-on-one. Just as importantly, says Mayo, “we plant the seed of change” and get the inmates thinking about taking a healing path.

Inmates need to want to take that step to heal. Often that means first going through a stage of denial before hitting rock bottom and seeking healing. Inmates are allowed to stay at Waseskun as long as they need to.

“We encourage them to work to the point that they have enough of their own medicine that when they walk out the gate they will continue this on,” said Mayo.

Elders also work with inmates on a reintegration plan. Often inmates are going to metropolitan areas, where cultural and spiritual guidance is difficult to find, or they are returning to their home community, which is unhealthy. Such situations are challenging to the recently-released men, says Mayo.

“We are very fortunate that we have ancestors that have left us very, very rich teachings, and ceremonies. We have everything that we need to help the ones that are seeking healing,” said Nicholas.

“It doesn’t matter where you come from, you just have to be a human being. It’s hoped that something exists that can help change this whole story, at least part of it. When we sit down and when we walk with the fellows who make that decision to come to us, they soon learn that we walk with medicine, that we have an extremely high respect for medicine, the teachings that we are continuously receiving and sharing and it never runs out.”

Waseskun Healing Centre began as a half-way house in Montreal 27 years ago. Since 1999, it has served as a Section 81 Corrections Services Canada healing lodge, providing 34 beds for men in minimum security and as a community residential facility for offenders who are on some form of conditional release to the community.

In the 2014-15 Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, Sapers noted that Aboriginal inmates spend more time in segregation and serve more of their sentence behind bars compared to non-Aboriginal inmates.

Between 2005 and 2015, the Indigenous inmate population grew by 50 per cent compared to an overall offender growth rate of 10 per cent. First Nations, Inuit and Métis inmates now represent just over 25 per cent of the in-custody population, despite comprising just 4.3 per cent of the Canadian population.  Indigenous women, the fastest growing sub-population in federal custody, now comprise 37 per cent of all women serving a sentence of over two years, said Sapers.