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The Toronto Star's "Atkinson series - Tragedy or Triumph - Canadian Public Policy and Aboriginal Addiction" continues this week with two more articles. Click here for links to all the stories from this series.

About the Author ...

Marie Wadden is a journalist who has been concerned about the problems of addiction in Canadian Aboriginal communities since first visiting Davis Inlet in 1978. Her passion for the subject earned her the 2005 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and led her to a year-long, cross-country trek to look at the causes, effects and potential solutions to the addiction crisis among Aboriginals.

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The lost generations - Two Aboriginal doctors seek a way to heal the trauma that has haunted a community for a century
Nov. 25, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

Long before the barricades went up at the Six Nations reserve in Caledonia last February, Dr. Cornelia Wieman was treating the community's hidden wounds.

"Nell" Wieman is Canada's only Aboriginal psychiatrist and at 41 is a dynamo, driven by unseen wounds of her own to make a difference. It's people like her, and another Aboriginal doctor in Toronto, Peter Menzies, who hold out the most hope for happier Aboriginal lives in Canada.

They are on the frontlines of the battle against a psychological condition that has only recently been diagnosed. It's called "intergenerational trauma."

The term, first coined in the mid-1980s by U.S. scholar Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, is defined as what happens when an ethnic group is traumatized over an extended period of time. What happened to the Aboriginals over the past 100 years has resulted in the highest levels of alcohol addiction and suicide in Canada.

"Forced assimilation and cumulative losses across generations involving language, culture and spirituality contribute to the breakdown of the family kinship networks and social structures," Dr. Brave Heart writes. "The historical legacy and the current psychosocial conditions contribute to ongoing intergenerational traumas."

Wieman's students at the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine might have trouble picturing their chic teacher behind the wheel of the truck she uses to get around the bumpy roads at Six Nations. At the University of Toronto, she's known as Dr. Wieman, co-director of the Indigenous Health Research program, a fit woman who walks to work from her downtown condominium.

Wieman's truck belongs to the life she shares with her husband Tim, a custom furniture maker, at a ranch-style home on the outskirts of Six Nations. That's where Wieman sprouted new Aboriginal roots after the first ones were severed when she was very young. Intergenerational trauma forced Wieman to lead separate lives between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal world.

"This is the Jay Silverheels Complex," she says, acting as a Six Nations tour guide one day in January. Wieman knows the reserve well since she ran the local mental health clinic for eight years. "Jay Silverheels was Tonto in The Lone Ranger series. He comes from this community. Actually, I met his nephew in Toronto."

Wieman's birthplace is farther away, in Little Grand Rapids, Man. She was able to avoid the trauma trap because she was raised off the reserve by a Dutch family in Thunder Bay after her mother died from binge drinking. Wieman studied medicine and psychiatry at McMaster University. Her work at Six Nations enabled her to see first-hand what had killed her mother.

"I think you're dealing with generations of people who have been damaged by colonialism," Wieman says, "and the way that we have been treated by the dominant culture makes you feel dispirited. You feel devalued and so people will turn to things like addictions as a way of coping, of self-medicating, of not really wanting to be here because their situation is just so intolerable."

Experts in the field of Aboriginal mental health say "intergenerational trauma" killed Wieman's mother.

It also prevented Dr. Peter Menzies' parents from raising him. Menzies, 53, is the manager for Aboriginal services at the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction in Toronto. He did his Ph.D. thesis on Aboriginal intergenerational trauma and still marvels today at this achievement.

That's because like Wieman, his life got off to a rocky start. Menzies' mother comes from the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation near Sudbury, but he was raised by the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Children's Aid Society.

Menzies never turned his back on his Aboriginal heritage; instead he embraced his people's social challenges, looking for answers. His CV reflects that commitment — "20 years experience in the field of social work: child welfare, family services, income maintenance, addiction and mental health." Now he's helping Toronto's Aboriginal homeless from a clinic on the busy corner of Parliament and King Sts.

"I've always maintained that alcohol and drugs are only symptoms," he says.

"When I sit down with an Aboriginal person to provide counselling, I don't even deal with the drinking issues. Like, I see guys who have left their community because they have so much trauma in them that they don't know to how deal with it. The community can't deal with them because they don't have the mental health services. So why is that? Why can't they stay in their communities or near their communities and get treatment for however long it takes to deal with this trauma that they're carrying?"

Canadians first connected trauma with alcoholism when the military hero Gen. Romeo Dallaire was found drunk on a park bench in 2000. Dallaire had "post traumatic stress disorder" — the psychological effect of witnessing atrocities in warfare. The other types of traumas people experience as a result of war are called "collective" and "historic" trauma — terms used to describe what happened psychologically to the Jews who survived the Holocaust and the Japanese who survived the atomic bomb.

Harvard University scholar Dr. Sousan Abadian compares the experience of Canada's First Nations communities with that of the Japanese and European Jews.

"When indigenous people were traumatized, they could not get healed by their ceremonies because they had been outlawed. The Japanese still had theirs. There were still rabbis in other parts of the world to help the European Jews. Indigenous people lost everything, even their sacred lands."

"The trauma I see is huge, huge," says Edmonton's Dr. Jane Simington, who has been counselling Aboriginal women in Canada's prisons for 16 years. "Children were ripped out of their homes at the age of 5 for residential schools and they didn't come back until they were 17; many of them had been abused physically and sexually. Their parents were, in the meantime, at home grieving their children, so they turned to alcohol."

In April, Wieman was asked to do a psychiatric evaluation of a female Aboriginal offender serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. Experiences like this are heartrending for her.

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`The signs of improvement are all there, but we still have to deal with addictions and mental health issues.'

Dr. Peter Menzies

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"I want to see an improved mental health status for our people," she says firmly. "I would love to see much lower rates of prison incarceration and suicide. I want to be part of the solution to that."

Menzies shares Wieman's commitment.

He dreams one day of creating an addiction treatment centre that will help Aboriginal leaders who are still drinking to return to their reserves and better serve their people.

"I watch some of our leaders and I see a lot of pain and suffering. Why do their personalities look defeated? Why don't I see a head held high? As a therapist, I think if I spent an hour with that person I'm going to find out what's not resolved. I want to create a place where they can come for their own healing. There would be highly trained therapists to work with them. Maybe in an old farmhouse, somewhere peaceful. I'd like to make it a centre of excellence for the study and treatment of indigenous addictions."

"We need to acknowledge what's happened in the past historically," says Wieman. "But we also need to focus on the solutions and what the future holds. I think that will come from my generation and even more so from the generation that comes after."

Both doctors have similar prescriptions for improving their peoples' lives. The first would be streamlining government departments and health agencies so the care goes where it's needed. "Once a First Nation person moves to an urban centre, Ottawa is saying that they are the responsibility of the province, but the province is saying, no, well, they're not our responsibility because the Indian Act says `Indian,'" Menzies says with frustration.

"So if they can just get rid of all this and say, yeah, we at Indian Affairs are responsible for First Nations, that'd be a big help."

The jurisdictional problems also infect the medical profession.

"In psychiatry, no one really wants to deal with addictions," says Wieman. "If someone with a substance abuse problem goes to a psychiatrist, they'll be told to get help for their addiction first. Those who have substance abuse problems also have mental health issues. I think the two are inextricably linked."

When the lives of Aboriginal people were disrupted, there was little social support available within their communities because everyone was affected in the same way. Social workers and welfare cheques sent in from the outside seem to have only made things worse by creating dependency and killing self-esteem.

The problems might seem insurmountable to many, but not to these two gifted Aboriginal healers.

"Actually, I see a lot of hope," says Menzies. "No. 1, we're the fastest growing population in Canada; No. 2, there are more of us than ever attending colleges and universities. Who would have thought that every month in Toronto a First Nations newspaper would come to my doorstep? Who would have thought that there would be an Aboriginal People's Television Network?

"So the signs of improvement are all there, but we still have to deal with addictions and mental health issues. We still need to get at the core of the intergenerational trauma."

Wieman sees a long road ahead, particularly the challenge of creating more Aboriginal health-care specialists.

"The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People recommended 10,000 health professionals be trained in 10 years," she says. "The infrastructure to train that many health professionals just doesn't exist. Try to tell any of the 17 medical schools in Canada that they need to make training Aboriginal physicians a priority. There are very few schools in Canada that have answered that challenge."

There are also discriminatory pay practices on First Nation reserves that Wieman deplores. She was forced to leave her Six Nations job because of the poor pay.

"If I tell people as a psychiatrist I billed $36,000 last year, they'd think I'm lying," she explains. "A colleague of mine started working for a mental health clinic at Townsend, three kilometres from our clinic, and as soon as she started she got sessional fees because it was off reserve."

Dr. Wieman was paid on a fee-for-service basis by the province of Ontario while her mental health nurses were paid by the federal government.

"We had tried for eight years to access these sessional fees only to be told, well, she's practising on a reserve so it's a federal thing, so you can't have these things. I don't think I ever billed more than $40,000 a year because I didn't see people every five minutes, I saw them once an hour," she says.

Wieman quit to put her energies into changing the system. Climbing out of her truck when the Six Nations tour is over, she becomes more reflective.

"We're taught that we need to use the gifts we've been given as best we can and work as hard as we can over the course of our lifetime to make things better for our young people especially. That's a huge responsibility and one that I take seriously."

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Click here for link to the following Toronto Star story

The healing power of huskies - Inuit community restoring pride after a century of traumatic events
Nov. 25, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - ATKINSON FELLOW

A woman leans out the window of her house and shouts in Inuktitut. Children on their way to school turn and start running toward the harbour.

"There's a dog team coming back," one of the children calls out over her shoulder as she dashes for the harbour at Kangirsuk, a village of 400 Inuit in the eastern Arctic.

All eyes scan the vast expanse of white for something other than snow and ice. Race officials station themselves near the long string of colorful flags that mark the finish line. Tiny dark specks draw closer to the end of the 525-kilometre Ivakkak race that crossed from one end of the Nunavik region in northern Quebec to the other.

With astonishing speed, 12 dogs, spread out like a fan, rush toward the finish line, pulling a sled with two men on board.

These dogs are special and symbolic, a dozen of only 200 Inuit husky that carry on the bloodline after 20,000 were killed by Quebec police and the RCMP during the 1960s and `70s.

The police say the dogs were diseased. The Inuit have another explanation.

"We believe the dogs were killed so our people would be easier to control," says Pita Aatami, the president of the Makivik Corporation, the company that administers a $124-million dollar Inuit heritage fund and also sponsors the dog sled race.

It's a harsh accusation and the suspicion will linger until an inquiry takes place, adding to the bitterness felt for other policies that have damaged Inuit life, such as the relocation of people to larger communities, residential schools that were sites of sexual abuse, and banning religious and cultural customs.

The attempts to assimilate the Inuit go back more than 100 years, producing what experts call "intergenerational trauma" that has resulted in the highest rates of alcohol addiction and suicide in the country. The problems were compounded by diseases that decimated populations.

The trail of trauma extends across the country:

In 1919, one-third of the Inuit population in eastern Labrador was killed by the Spanish Flu epidemic carried on a mission boat. By the 1950s, these Inuit were just recovering when they were resettled to larger centres where it was more difficult to hunt and fish. They found themselves stuck in places where they had nothing to do. Because hunting defines who they are, culturally the people are devastated.

Today, the Inuit experience the highest rates of addiction and suicide in the country, and it is especially prevalent in the male population. An Inuit woman's organization called Pauktuutit says violence and abuse in their communities threatens the survival of the entire culture.

Out west, smallpox epidemics destroyed many First Nations communities in British Columbia in the late 19th century and their recovery was hindered by the gold rush that brought thousands of newcomers with alcohol and laws forcing the original residents to live on reserves while also banning customary religious practices.

In the 1950s, the Anishnawbe of Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemong (White Dog) in northern Ontario were gathered up from small isolated reserves where their economies were still viable and resettled to less productive land along a river that soon became polluted by mercury from a paper mill. Anastasia Shkilynk documents their experience in her book A Poison Stronger than Love. It's a frightening description of how a community can turn upon itself in a single generation.

The outlawing and destruction of Aboriginal practices like the Potlatch in western Canada and the "shaking tent" ceremonies — considered pagan by Christian churches — stripped Aboriginal people of their ability to recover from trauma.

"We went from nomadic self-sufficient family camps to being moved, sometimes without consent, into permanent settlements with much larger and unfamiliar social structures," Mary Simon, the leader of Canada's Inuit organization, told the Healing Our Spirit Worldwide conference in Edmonton this past summer. "Epidemics took a terrible toll. Many lost their lives while many others were left orphaned and dependent on others for their very survival."

The Healing conference, held every four years, began in 1992 as a forum to discuss alcohol and drug abuse issues and programs in indigenous communities throughout the world. The latest gathering in August drew more than 2,000 people from about 15 countries.

The consensus among presenters at the conference was that bringing back traditional ceremonies and practices will help heal individuals suffering from intergenerational trauma. Among the other recommendations: restore elders to their former role in Aboriginal society as the teachers of Aboriginal values, and increase psychotherapeutic services to assist with addiction and mental health problems.

Charlene Belleau from Alkali Lake, B.C, a First Nations community that became famous for its sobriety movement 25 years ago, summed up what has to be done in her speech.

"It's really, really important that our children not be made to carry the burden of our past," she said.

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On the frozen ground of Kangirsuk, the Inuit dog sledders are doing their part to make sure the burden is lighter.

As they cross the finish line of the Ivakkak race, mushers Adamie Qurnak and Allie Tukalak are surrounded, hugged by bear-shaped men in heavy parkas. The children stand back as though in awe of their power.

Qurnak and Tukalak had raced their dogs from Puvurnituq on the Hudson's Bay coast, east to Kangirsuk on Ungava Bay. The April journey, in one of the world's harshest climates, took eight days.

The winning team made the same trip in five days.

"I feel like a proud Inuk man," says Tukalak, emerging from another embrace, his smile lighting up a face burned the colour of mahogany.

The mushers hammer poles into the ice to tether their exhausted dogs as Kangirsuk boys hover, ready to help.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Kangirsuk recreation centre to celebrate the 15 teams that participated in the race through a territory in northern Quebec the size of France. Here, 10,000 people live in 15 scattered coastal communities.

People had arrived from their homes with boxes of frozen char, salmon and caribou meat. Others had come with an abundance of cooked food, but the southerners were fascinated by delicacies like fermented walrus, and seabirds (in some cases not only uncooked but also unplucked).

The raw and frozen food was laid out on clean strips of cardboard in the centre of the hall floor (the cooked food placed on tables at the front) creating an ingenious dining table for hundreds. The raw food diners knelt on the floor, showing the uninitiated how to cut a piece of frozen fish or fowl with a sharp knife and then how to vigorously chew. The visitors were told to "think sushi."

Outside the building there were clusters of inebriated young Inuit men. One of them, who a few days before had, with great skill and humour, translated from Inuktitut to English for visitors, apologized for how people were eating inside.

"These are very traditional people," he said. "We don't eat like that now, many of us, we're more modern today."

The translator's embarrassment of his peoples' cultural eating style is shared by many young Inuit today, who see no reflection of their way of life in the popular media and fear something must be wrong with it.

Participants in the dog sled race certainly didn't sign up to rebuild their egos. They had their eyes on the prizes awarded this night, everything from cash to expensive commodities not otherwise available here — stainless steel refrigerators and leather sofas.

The race's sponsor, Makivik, was established in 1978 by the money Inuit here received as compensation from the James Bay and Northern Quebec hydroelectric project that caused flooding and water diversion on their land.

Pita Aatami, Makivik's 46-year-old president, is bound to reinvest profits from investments — which includes Air Inuit and First Air — back into the community.

That includes this race and the Inuit huskies that were almost wiped out. Makivik is breeding more and it is the only breed allowed in the Ivakkak dog sled race — no blue-eyed Siberians permitted here.

The strategy likely won't make Makivik more money, but it will create something that finally has a chance to grow. Inuk pride.

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Trial delay in scandal raises concern - Case that surfaced in 2000 won't be heard until 2008 - Health Canada officials punished for their roles
Oct. 18, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN - SPECIAL TO THE STAR

An opposition MP and a Crown prosecutor have expressed concerns about delays in the trial of the man at the centre of a multimillion-dollar scandal involving highly placed Health Canada officials.

Perry Fontaine, director of the Virginia Fontaine Addiction Foundation of Manitoba, was charged after media reports in 2000 of a Caribbean cruise involving Fontaine, about 70 foundation staff and Paul Cochrane, the senior Health Canada official who was responsible for funding the foundation.

Fontaine has been charged with five counts of giving benefits to a public official and five counts of fraud over $5,000 as well as forgery and possession of goods by crime. The case will not be heard until Oct. 14, 2008, and his trial is expected to run until March 2009.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the case and the delays in wrapping it up have hurt other treatment programs for natives, according to health-care workers.

Crown prosecutor Dale Harvey expressed concern about the long delays in bringing the case to trial.

He said the latest delay was caused by the busy schedule of a defence lawyer. Fontaine's lawyer, Harvey Pollack, declined comment.

Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the MP for Winnipeg North, says she is shocked Fontaine's trial won't be heard for another two years.

"This is one more delay in a case that's been dragging on for too long," says the New Democrat MP.

This spring, Wasylycia-Leis, who keeps raising the matter in the House of Commons, once again asked for a public inquiry to prove sufficient measures are in place to ensure against abuse of public funds.

"(Health Minister) Tony Clement said he'd look into it," she says.

Two of the senior Health Canada officials have already been tried, convicted and punished for their roles.

Cochrane, former head of Health Canada's First Nations and Inuit Health branch, was convicted in March 2005 after pleading guilty to taking gifts worth more than $200,000 from Fontaine's foundation.

Cochrane agreed to testify against Fontaine and was sentenced to a year in jail. As part of his plea bargain, charges against his wife and son were dropped.

Last November, Patrick Nottingham, the former regional director of Health Canada in Manitoba, pleaded guilty to arranging funding for the treatment centre in exchange for $1 million in personal benefits. Nottingham received a conditional sentence of two years less a day after agreeing to testify against Fontaine and to return as much of the money as he could.

While awaiting trial, Perry Fontaine works as a long-distance dispatcher in Edmonton for the moving franchise Two Small Men with Big Hearts. The firm is operated by his daughter, Vera Bruyere, who was associate CEO for the foundation and also faces charges of giving benefits to public officials.

The Virginia Fontaine treatment centre, closed down by Ottawa in 2000, was located on the Sagkeeng reserve, 145 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.

Sagkeeng, also known as Fort Alexander, is the largest reserve in Manitoba with 6,500 residents.

At its peak, the Virginia Fontaine centre employed 100 and had the capacity to treat 46 alcoholics and 36 solvent abusers at a time. A small wing of the building reopened in 2004 as the Min Pimatiziwin Family Treatment program.

Susan Thomas runs this program with only 14 staff to help troubled families with addiction problems. She says the demand for services far exceeds the centre's ability to meet them and this is the most troubling legacy of the scandal.

Health Canada moved quickly when details of the Caribbean cruise were made public. Auditors were paid $2 million to examine the department's books and those of the foundation. Details of what they learned are available on the federal department's website.

According to the auditors, $12 million went to the foundation during a 2 1/2-year period. Accounting procedures were loose. The auditors say they could find: "... no contracts to support payments, no invoices to support payments, little or no evidence of deliverables, questionable business rationale for payments, inconsistent explanations provided by (Virginia Fontaine Addiction Foundation) officials, questionable documents used as support for explanations ..."

Cochrane was responsible for authorizing Health Canada's payments to Fontaine. Cochrane, a Newfoundlander with a degree in engineering, began working for Health Canada in 1974.

The Cochrane and Fontaine families took four cruises together between October 1999 and October 2000, according to the Health Canada audit. The foundation also gave Cochrane season's tickets to the Ottawa Senators' games. One of Cochrane's sons worked at the treatment centre while another received a vehicle purchased by Perry Fontaine. According to the auditors, Patrick Nottingham and his wife, Julia Mandamin, were also among Fontaine's friends. Mandamin created a company called Animeke that received $917,000 to produce educational material on addiction prevention. The auditors found three papers produced by Animeke to account for this contract. The auditors reported the material had been plagiarized.

As part of Nottingham's plea bargain, charges against Mandamin were dropped.

Sharon Clarke, executive director of the Native Addiction Partnership Foundation (NAPF) in Saskatchewan says the affair tarnished all aboriginal people who work to heal their communities where, according to reports, between 70 and 80 per cent believe addiction is the single greatest problem. Worse, the affair has diminished the resources available.

Clarke's foundation, with a staff of five, reaches out to Canada's most remote aboriginal communities to provide training for more than 1,400 addiction workers, prevent staff burnout, help in the completion of complicated reports required by Health Canada and ensure treatment centres qualify for accreditation.

"I could cry when I think about what's been lost," she says. "When we approached people at Health Canada for an increase in our funding after the Sagkeeng scandal, they were very cautious. They were all new staff. It's a long process of education getting them to trust you, especially after Sagkeeng. I don't think the new people trusted anybody and you can't really blame them."