AHF Report: Aboriginal Healing in Canada: Studies in Therapeutic Meaning and Practice
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series
Aboriginal Healing in Canada: Studies in Therapeutic Meaning and Practice
Introduction
In 1992, a national team of researchers was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to form the National Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research. One of the funded projects within this network was “Models and Metaphors of Mental Health and Healing in Aboriginal Communities.” Working in conjunction with the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF), several goals for this project were developed.
First, we sought to provide descriptions of five AHF-funded healing programs that would allow for comparisons among them and the generation of models of best practices in the delivery of healing services to traumatized Aboriginal individuals and communities. We were mindful that the mandate of the AHF was not indeterminate; sooner or later funding would end and, unfortunately, possibly many of the programs and centres it funded. As part of the legacy of the AHF, it was important to have some detailed documentation, inherently qualitative in nature, about what these programs actually looked like. Proposal applications and AHF site visits, quarterly reporting, and audits were not designed to understand the daily workings of healing programs as staff and clients grappled with complex issues and problems. These were designed to monitor program efficacy in project finance and work plan fulfillment. Programs naturally undergo change from the funding proposal stage, where applicants detail what they hope to accomplish and how, to implementation, where they put the plan into action and adjust to the logistics of a real client base, real therapists, and a limited budget. It was important to attain a snapshot of what was really going on in an effort to provide a record of what approaches were more successful than others. We hoped to provide sufficient details of treatment models that future centres and programs would find useful for their own planning. Many AHF-funded programs, and those that fall outside of AHF funding parameters yet deal with substantially the same issues, have been forced to reinvent the wheel because of a lack of quality information on what works and what does not. Our aim in this research was to provide a valuable tool for future program development.
The second goal was to develop our understanding of the meanings and processes of healing in Aboriginal communities. At the outset, it was our sense that, despite the widespread adoption of healing discourse by Aboriginal people and others, what was actually meant by healing was ill-defined, variable, and inherently flexible. It made sense that to study the impact of healing programs one also needed to understand how clients and therapists/healers understood this key concept and employed it to frame their experiences. Further, we wished to discern if healing meant something different across the various types of programs and regions represented in this study.
The third goal was to contribute to theoretical understandings of the process of healing and the development of appropriate research methodologies to study it. All the primary researchers in this project are university-based scholars who are committed to the advancement of social scientific knowledge in the service of humankind. It is our view that theoretical issues, when properly addressed within an ethical context, are inherently valuable to the broader community because they speak to the transferability of the findings. It was our goal that the lessons learned in this project be communicated widely because of their potential usefulness to others, and a scholarly approach was one means of doing this. However, in this publication, we have endeavoured to present our work in an accessible form, so that therapists, healers, clients, and other interested service providers can obtain maximum benefit. Broader, more theoretical treatments will likely be forthcoming in other venues by the various authors.
The five programs chosen for the study were selected in consultation with the AHF on the basis of several criteria that represent a broad cross-section of relevant geographical, cultural, and service-style considerations and AHF case studies. Programs were located in rural, remote, and urban regions of Canada, from the west coast to the east coast, from urban centre to Subarctic and Arctic, in British Columbia, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick. Some were residential treatment centres, where clients underwent treatment on an in-patient basis; others were outpatient facilities and even drop-in clinics. Further, some were located in community contexts allowing for some degree of uniformity in the cultural heritage of the client base, and in other instances, the treatment centre clients came from varied culturally different backgrounds.
The project director (Waldram) selected the researchers (Adelson, Fiske, Fletcher, and Gone) based on their expertise and experience in working on health issues with Aboriginal communities. In several cases, these researchers brought in other partners to assist in the work.
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