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We move Kashechewan at its peril - Canada must listen to aboriginal people before making decisions on their behalf, says Marie Wadden - Dec. 13, 2006 - MARIE WADDEN

It's a shame Alan Pope, the former Ontario cabinet minister who has recommended the federal government move Kashechewan from James Bay to an area outside of Timmins, didn't speak to Jennifer Wynne when he was on the reserve.

She should have been his first stop.

Wynne is the community's NNADAP (National Native Alcohol and Drug Addiction Program) worker. That program is 25 years old this year and there's a drug addiction worker on most First Nations reserves who knows why their communities aren't working.

"He didn't come to my house, or my office either," Wynne says. "I wish he had."

Wynne would have been Anastasia Shkilnyk's first stop. Like Pope, Shkilnyk was sent by the federal government to a reserve devastated by water problems. It was 1976 and the community was Grassy Narrows near Kenora, where mercury from a pulp and paper mill had polluted the local river.

She found a community devastated as much by alcohol as by mercury. She documents the social chaos in her book, A Poison Stronger than Love.

She learned the downfall of these formerly self-sufficient Ojibway was caused by their forced resettlement from one reserve to another; from self-sufficiency to dependency. A delicate balance in their lives had been upset by policy-makers who went ahead with plans that ignored the wishes of the very people they were supposed to be "helping."

"People are very emotional in Kashechewan right now," Wynne says. "They don't know what to do. Whenever we talk about moving, people start to cry. They're depressed."

Wynne is describing a people who are at the very edge of their resiliency; their ability to cope with change and setbacks. Many on the reserve have dysfunctional ways of coping, mainly through alcohol and drugs.

Wynne estimates nine of every 10 adults in the community abuse alcohol, when they can get it. Like most aboriginal reserves, Kashechewan is supposed to be dry.

Wynne says bootleggers make $80 to $100 selling an average size bottle of vodka or rum on the reserve in the fall. The price drops in winter when the ice creates a road to the nearest liquor store, several hundred kilometres away. The price of bootlegged booze is usually a good indicator of a community's need to escape reality.

In the course of the Atkinson series, Tragedy or Triumph: Canadian Public Policy and Aboriginal Addictions, we've learned a lot about the high cost, financially and socially, of making and enacting policies for aboriginal people that does not engage them and that ignores their social fragility.

Two evaluations criticize the strategies Health Canada and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development have used to help relocate the Innu of Davis Inlet, Labrador, to a beautiful new place called Natuashish.

The evaluators say our failure to properly involve the Innu initially when their healing plan was created and to ignore their social healing needs, have set back the community's recovery. New housing and a better infrastructure have given the former residents more motivation to stop drinking, but the healing is still in its early stages.

Kashechewan needs healing, too, and it should start now, before any move takes place. It will take years to build new houses wherever the people decide to go and this time must be used wisely.

Wynne needs a lot more help. Funding for a vital Health Canada position — a "wellness worker" — ran out this summer. The wellness worker runs addiction prevention programs. Why is there no one in this job? If ever a place in Canada needed a wellness worker, it's Kashechewan.

Wynne would like more training, especially in counselling. She is concerned that talk of moving permanently will create divisions in the community and upset people already weakened by addiction and its partners — sexual abuse and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Kashechewan has only one mental health worker.

According to Health Canada's formula (one drug addiction worker for every 700 people) Wynne should have a partner. She'd like it to be a man because, she says, men in the community are not comfortable talking to her.

"I was sexually abused," she says openly, "and I know I couldn't talk about that with a male worker, I needed to speak to a woman. If we're going to help the men with their problems, they need men to talk to."

A team of mental health and wellness workers is needed in Kashechewan right now to help prepare the people for the big decisions ahead.

If we've learned anything from our short but disastrous history of interference in aboriginal lives, it's that they must be active participants in all decisions made.

We move Kashechewan at its peril. Kashechewan's troubles won't go away because the children have access to more arenas and public swimming pools, and their mothers can work behind the A&W counter or sling hamburgers at a McDonald's.

Ask the people who live on reserves that encircle Kenora, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Goose Bay, or Williams Lake in B.C., if their lives are better than those of the people of Kashechewan. They'd say "no." You don't see many aboriginal people working in these towns, nor do their children feel welcome in many of the local public facilities.

The social problems on the reserves surrounding Canadian towns and cities are often so extreme that people are too insecure to leave the reserve.

Joe Linklater, the chief of Canada's most remote and socially healthy aboriginal community, Old Crow in the Yukon, told us you don't have to live near an urban centre to be a healthy aboriginal community. What is needed is a large land base to continue nurturing the aboriginal cultures' spiritual relationship with the natural world.

We have a lot to learn in Canada about making good policy for suffering aboriginal communities. We won't learn until we start to listen to the people who must always bear the brunt of our "good intentions."

One informed Kashechewan resident is telling us her people need to heal their hearts and minds before they can move anywhere and we should be listening.