Davis Inlet kids go to Sango Bay

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After six months of addiction counselling the Davis Inlet children have gone home. But not to Davis Inlet.

The 17 youths, who were flown to the Poundmaker's lodge in Alberta for intensive solvent addiction therapy and sexual abuse counselling, landed at the Inlet for a community homecoming Sept. 2.

But soon they will be moving to a wilderness camp at Sango Bay, 15 km away on the mainland, where Innu leaders eventually want to relocate the community.

Counsellors from Poundmaker's said they did not want the children to return immediately to the environment from which they had spent the last six months escaping.

The Sango Bay camp will be the buffer that the children need to return to their community, said Poundmaker's Lodge Adolescent Treatment Centre directly Ruth Morin.

"Sango Bay will be a kind of treatment centre," she said.

For the last two weeks, Inlet residents have been working at Sango Bay erecting tents to house the children and their families, Davis Inlet Chief Katie Rich said. While the date of the children's arrival to the camp is uncertain, they are scheduled to remain there with counsellors from Poundmaker's for the next two months.

Many of the children were afraid to go back to the Inlet's environment of abuse and addiction, said the Poundmaker's Lodge executive director Pat Shirt.

"I know a lot of the kids here are afraid to go home," he said. "But that's okay, because fear is healthy. We wouldn't be doing our job if they weren't afraid to go home."

Davis Inlet's current island location, 330 km north of Goose Bay, is in part responsible for the dire problems facing the community of 500, said Rich. The absence

of wild game and clean drinking water, and the prevalence of chronic unemployment, boredom and despair makes life almost unbearable.

Many residents turn to alcohol and solvent abuse as a means of escape, she said. Sango Bay would offer greater access to clean drinking water and especially to the caribou herds that help sustain the Mushuau Innu's traditional culture.

Native councillors have also been training adults in the community itself, said Maggie Hodgson, executive director of the Nechi Centre, an addiction treatment centre affiliated with Poundmaker's. Approximately 60 people in the inlet are now abstaining from alcohol and solvents.

But the centre's counsellors still have a big job ahead of them, she said. Communities like Davis Inlet that take big steps in terms of sobriety often have relapses.

A complete recovery could take as long as five years, Hodgson said.