Violence, abuse reach crisis proportions

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Native communities are in crisis. It is not as it was a century ago during the 1885 rebellion. It is not even as it was when the native children were taken away to government or church schools to learn how not to be Indians.

Today, Native communities face an epidemic of violence, suicide and alcohol related problems, both mental and physical, which threaten to destroy Indians as a people.

Yet the problem is not a new one. It has been around for decades. This is why it is dangerous: self-destruction in all its forms has become part of the Native lifestyle.

"It's scary," admits Chester Cunningham, executive director of Native Counselling Services of Alberta (NCSA). "The violence is really concerning us."

He senses an increase in the frustration and the crime. "Why all of a sudden, I don't know. There's always been a bit of violence, and it seemed to move around the province - Saddle Lake, Atikameg. Now it seems to be cropping up all over."

Other members of the Native Counseling Board of directors are becoming very concerned, says Cunningham. He hopes to call a meeting of provincial Native Elders to work out an approach to this situation.

The Elders have already met to discuss problems with Natives in prison, says Cunningham.

"They lash out and slash out verbally and physically, operating in the dark. They steal, they get into all kinds of negative things because of what happened to them. They can't see through the fog that they've created for themselves or that's been created for them," explained a Native lifeskills coach.

Trying to get a grasp on the violence is difficult. Statistics showing the sort of crimes committed by Native people simply aren't kept by the RCMP, says Statistical Services NCO George Lensen. In addition, Statistics Canada, although it has a census specifically for Natives, has nothing on violent crimes. Prisoners are not included in the census.

But there are a few clues to dealing with this very complex problem. Information is kept on Native mortality; the means and rate of death. As well, some data is kept on the number of Indians in Federal and Provincial jails - but not as much is known about why they're in there.

A young Native mother, not more than 19, talks of how she was sent to jail for not paying the fine for a minor alcohol-related offence. She was given the option of working a minimum number of hours in the community instead of having to serve her term, but she turned down the suggestion.

As far as she could see it, her child would be taken care of free during the 30 days imprisonment. On the other hand, she would have to pay for child care during the hours of community work, a luxury she could not afford. Obviously, it was more sense to sit in jail than do the community work.

As it happened, the matron in the prison managed to get the woman's sentence reduced to a couple of days. The young mother only laughed at the silliness of the matron, asking why she bothered. The Native woman did not seem to care what the community might think about her being in jail.

She is not along in feeling this way. In some communities, it seems that a jail term if almost a rite of passage. In others, it is a way of life.

***

It is late fall, a number of years ago. Two men, a white and a Native, are walking down the NAR rails in Edmonton. They stop at one of the yards and talk with the workers, mostly transients, who are loading ties on a truck. The white observes that it's going to be a cold winter. He hasn't got any money, nor job prospects. He and his friend are going to pull a B&E, a break and entry, and spend the winter inside, with lots of good food. Why not, he asks. What else are jails for?

***

A problem with the mortality and imprisonment rates is that they cannot tell us

of lifestyle, merely of its extremes. "Behind the official statistics on mortality used by demographers is flesh and blood, a sea of faces," say George Jarvis, an Alberta sociologist and Menno oldt, head of the 1970s Task Force on Suicide. "Seldom is a government agency likely to ask the probing questions needed to give social substance to official statistics."

A second problem is that violence and alcohol are not of themselves the sickness; they are symptoms in the vicious cycle of a community epidemic. The source of this epidemic was the destruction of the Native way of life. And its fuel, its centering factors, are two basic killers - two sides of the same coin: alcoholism and the helplessness/ hopelessness of beaten people. It is these killers that maintain the cycle.

What we have done is named a common factor in the Native community - and called it the centre of the community's illness. By naming this commonality, we are in a dangerous area; we run the risk of isolating Native people from their present cultural environment and contributing to the stereotyping and racism.

Yet at the same time, we can find similarities between the needs and concern of the Native people and segments of the white population, of disadvantaged people in many cultures. By naming the common factor, we have admitted that there may be a solution.

This solution is as complicated as the problem, but already many communities have begun to take steps in that direction. The general approach of many people working in Native rehabilitation areas is that Native people must take their culture into the 20th century. They must at the same time be able to live and work with non-Natives, and listen to the wisdom of their own Elders. The alcoholism/helplessness of the present vicious cycle must be replaced with the tradition and culture that guided them in the past - but they must be in a modern context.