Abuse

I’ve been struggling with my emotions this week. My attempts to understand how years of sexual abuse could go unchecked in residential schools and then later in foster homes, how people could bring that abuse back to their communities and then subject loved ones and community members to the same abuse they experienced has me baffled and disturbed.

I’ve long known about the abuse that happened within the residential school system but didn’t realize until recently the physical and sexual abuse that many First Nations children experienced during the Sixties Scoop and that it went into the present. I feel so sad that so many people have had their experience of sexuality affected by systemic abuse.

I’ve had by many accounts an ideal childhood. I grew up white, middle-class with a family that’s educated and never abused me in any way that I can figure. I’ve been given the best chance of success that society can offer and I’ve done well under the current system. In reading about some of the physical and sexual abuse that some First Nations people suffered, I try to imagine what I would have been like if I had experienced a childhood other than mine. I would be different and likely would have met with much less societal success. It seems to me that even First Nations children who come from good homes have to work harder to achieve the goals that I seem to have achieved so easily because of the historical mistreatment of First Nations people and ongoing racism (to say the least). 

I was talking with a teacher that I know about how going through puberty was hard enough but to throw in the confusion of years of sexual abuse would have been nearly impossible to deal with on an emotional level.  When I look at how a culture of sexual abuse was passed on from generation to generation in some First Nations communities, it makes perfect sense to see those communities self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. I would too. But then that self-medication leads to a whole host of other social ills – unemployment, children with FASD and high crime rates so that numbing is not for the best.

There have been success stories about communities that have worked to tackle their issues with alcohol and in turn sexual abuse. Starting in the ‘70s, the community of Alkali Lake in the Cariboo has worked to go from a population where most people abused alcohol to now where 95 per cent of the community is sober. I had a chance to talk to the chief of Alkali Lake a few years ago and was inspired by how much positive change came from people making the choice to be better for themselves and their youth. It is with examples like that I can start to see how people might deal with some of the abuse and begin to move past it to become people connected with their culture and their selves.

I know that reading about abuse doesn’t mean that I truly understand it, but reading people’s personal accounts of how abuse affected them and their lives has been moving from me and I feel that I will now approach interviewing First Nations people about abuse with more sensitivity, time and compassion.