Rupert Ross - Indigenous Healing: Exploring Traditional Paths

PENGUIN

INDIGENOUS HEALING

RUPERT ROSS is a retired assistant Crown Attorney for the District of Kenora, Ontario. Starting in 1985, he conducted criminal prosecutions for more than twenty remote Ojibway and Cree First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario. His first book, Dancing with a Ghost, started his exploration of aboriginal visions of existence and became a bestseller. His second book, Returning to the Teachings, was also a bestseller and examined the aboriginal preference for the peacemaker justice he observed during a three-year secondment with Justice Canada. Both books were shortlisted for the Gordon Montour Award for the best Canadian non-fiction book on social issues, and are presently used in universities and colleges across North America. Following his retirement, Ross was awarded the prestigious 2011 National Prosecution Award for Humanitarianism, and the Ontario Crown Attorneys Association has created an award named after him. He continues to live just north of Kenora with his wife, Val.

ALSO BY RUPERT ROSS

Dancing with a Ghost:
Exploring Aboriginal Reality

Returning to the Teachings:
Exploring Aboriginal Justice

To Valmy partner, wife and co-adventurer,
with all my love, respect and gratitude

Much of what used to be described as healing
is now viewed as decolonization therapy.

HOLLOW WATER FIRST NATION, MANITOBA, 2002

Introduction

S ome time ago, I attended a justice conference with a large group of Crown attorneys, police officers and aboriginal people. I remember an Anishinaabe (Ojibway) Elder telling us a story before he opened the conference with a traditional prayer. He told us that before the white man came to Turtle Island, his people had their own way of praying. It involved turning their heads skyward, searching the heavens with eyes wide open and raising their arms in a gesture of greeting and friendship. He told us that they had prayed that way for centuries and it seemed to work, because everybody had a pretty good life here on Mother Earth.

Then the white man came, and he had a different way of praying. Instead of turning his head skyward, he turned his head down. Instead of holding his arms out, he pulled them in tight and clasped his hands in a tipi shape below his chin. And instead of keeping his eyes open, he held them firmly closed for the whole prayer.

When the Indians saw that, they decided to give it a try. So thats what they didthey prayed, head down, hands clasped and eyes closed.

When they finished their prayer and looked up, however, all their land was gone! So thats why, he told us, they went back to praying in their own way.

When the Elder told us that story, he changed everything in the room. We had been three groups of people with a history of not getting along all that well together. Police often hold Crown attorneys in rather low regard, either because we tell them they dont have enough evidence or because we simply fail to prove their charges in court. Sometimes, Crown attorneys can come down on police for things like breaches of Charter rights that make the evidence they brought us inadmissible in court. And its fair to say that aboriginal people have many good reasons to be wary of both groups. At any rate, you could feel the polite tension in that roomuntil, that is, the Elder told us that story.

We all laughed, and we all laughed together. It was just such a beautiful, respectful way to break the ice at the very start of the conference. It set a common-ground tone that took all of us through the next two days in relative comfort with one another. We all became better listeners because of it, and better able to work together on the serious topics we were there to discuss.

I tell this story now with the same hope: that it will help to set a tone of being together in a state of mutual respect. If we can all laugh at the same thing, then anything is possible.

ITS BEEN A LONG TIME since the publication of my first two books, Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Aboriginal Reality in 1992 and Returning to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice in 1995. I have been largely silent since then, with the exception of several unpublished papers Ive written that have been making the rounds. My attention and energies have, instead, been focused on my wife, Val; on our three growing children; and on the pressing demands of being a criminal prosecutor in the remote, fly-in First Nations of northwestern Ontario. Now, after twenty-six years, Ive finally said goodbye to the courts and the formal justice system, and our children have grown and moved away. This is supposed to be my quiet time, when my focus rests on Val, on our travels together (especially back into the bush) and on our children and (at the moment) one grandson.

So why am I writing this book?

In fact, there are many reasons, but I want to share two in particular at the outset. Both came from a Calgary conference that was called some years ago to discuss the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a body established as a result of aboriginal lawsuits against churches and governments for their operation of the residential schools. Much discussion took place at the conference of the commissions determination to investigate that system and chronicle the impact across the decades. At the end of those discussions, the microphone was offered to people who had attended residential schools and wanted to comment on how they saw the reconciliation process unfolding. Two aboriginal people, a woman and a man, said things that have stayed with me ever since.

The first speaker was an aboriginal Grandmother. She said that she wished the TRC every success in helping to tell the full story of residential schools. Then she surprised me, because she didnt mention the need to educate non-aboriginal Canadians about that system. Instead, she focused on aboriginal children. Specifically, she said she felt they needed to understand how their parents and grandparents had been changed by those schools. Maybe then, she said softly, they can learn to forgive us for failing them so badly.

I have heard the same sentiment many times since then, and from many different people. The most recent was an aboriginal woman who spoke on the radio about a weekend gathering of female Elders and youth, and how surprised the Elders were to learn how little the youngest generation knew of residential schools. She too made a plea for that kind of education to begin.

So that is one reason for writing: to help tell the story of residential schools to the people who need to hear it if they are ever going to forge healthy relations with their own parents, grandparents and communities. I know Im not the only one to tell that story, or even the best one to do it, but Ive been told, and I believe, that every voice counts. My hope is that aboriginal and non-aboriginal people will find value in what I write here.

The second person who came to that TRC microphone was an older aboriginal man, an obvious graduate of residential school (now known as a survivor to distinguish the experience of imprisonment within residential schools from simply being a student in the countrys regular schools). He told the assembly that he had just one question he needed the TRC to answer for him: Why cant I cry? He explained that even when he knew things were sad, he could not cry. At that time, I had just begun my exploration of what western psychology calls emotional intelligence. Much of the discussion centres on what a child needs to be able to develop the emotional skill sets necessary to become an emotionally mature adult. I was particularly interested in learning about what happens to children who grow up in states of emotional numbness, with no one wanting to hear how they feel and no one able to guide them into nuanced awareness of the many feelings that course through them. That, as I was beginning to understand, was what children experienced in residential schools. When that man asked, Why cant I cry? he seemed to be speaking on behalf of generations of aboriginal children who had no choice but to grow up intentionally numbing themselves, both within residential schools and after leaving them. Lacking those emotional skill sets as adults, many do not know how to respond to the normal frustrations of life except by continuing that numbness or, particularly when alcohol or drugs are involved, exploding into anger and violence.