The Power of Healing
Extract from our new publication ‘Power.’
Veronica Yates, Director of CRIN, in conversation with Linda Young, artist and Traditional Knowledge Keeper for the Saskatchewan Public School Division in Canada.
When we first met you told us about how you want to break intergenerational trauma and that this was one of your messages in your piece. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
The work that I started doing as an art student was always related to the Land, to residential schools, and to being an Indigenous woman. And Land or Earth, not land ownership, but Land as a place of grounding, a place where you go home in spirit and emotions and heart, and physically, that was important to me.
There was a term that used to identify my work which is a ‘reparative act’ and I liked that because the Indian Act was what destroyed us. The Indian Act put us in residential schools, it took away our languages, our culture, all of that, and so I really like the term reparative act because what I do in the process is I repair an incident that happened in history.
Upon doing that I am also healing the generations that had this trauma. It’s not necessarily about me, it’s always about the people, the children, grandchildren, you know, so my work is primarily focused on repairing incidences to create a healing in the present.
What is the story about the piece in Venice?
I was involved in a hearing called the Alternative Dispute Resolution Process. The Hearings are very traumatic for Survivors because you’re sharing your lived trauma in an environment that feels very much like a courtroom, even though the Hearings were in settings such as a house, an office, or hotel board room.
What they do is they research you, your medical history, the school that you attended, and you get these binders of information about you. Part of my involvement in preparing for that was to gather information. A lot of residential school survivors were labelled as having post-traumatic stress disorder and so I had to find all that information, all the places I had gone to to seek help for healing. So that’s part of the process; ‘what have you one to help yourself’ in a sense. And that took about a year.
The thing about these Hearings is you get re-traumatised over and over again. When I received my binder on the history of the Residential School I attended, a very high percentage, maybe 60% or more of that information was in French and I don’t speak French, I don’t read French. So if you want to find yourself in the history it’s very difficult.
I had my hearing in 2006. We started with a pipe ceremony that my daughter and granddaughter attended, as well as my husband and my therapist. After we had the pipe ceremony my daughter left and just the adjudicator, the lawyer for Canada and my husband and my therapist and I were left for the duration of the Hearing. It’s important for people to know that as Survivors we want to protect our children as much as possible from the trauma that we went through. So the Hearing itself lasted for 12 hours, mainly because I had written an 83 page story about my experience and I wanted to read it.
When you’re going through this process — and every survivor goes through this — you’re always wondering if what you’re sharing is the truth. When you grow up in an institution that operates under three things: care, custody and control, you become a person who has difficulty in having faith in yourself and your truth. It takes a lot of courage to go through with the process and you have to be willing to go through it, you have to have the belief that your story is going to make a difference.
And so that’s where the story of the piece started. After it was all over I had these pages of material and I didn’t know what to do with them so I just left them alone. Later, I was asked to be part of an exhibition called Politics of Mother, I decided to maybe do something with that story.
I heard testimonies from people who said that telling their story could itself be traumatising, but it could also be healing. How did you find your path through this process?
When I do create something it’s always for a purpose and so making a baby swing/wêwêpison using my residential school story was a way for me to respond to my relationship with my mother, great grandmothers and my daughters and the ‘raising of children bundles’ that we carry. We were taken out of the safety of the wêwêpison where we learned about who we were through our language. Each tie is a small bundle that wraps painful memories in love, prayer and song, in the same way a mother, grandmother, auntie and sister would have sung a lullaby to the baby in the swing.
So prior to June 2012, my son was involved with collecting artefacts from residential schools across the country for a project called The Witness Blanket. He said: “Mom, you have to contribute,” and I didn’t want to. It’s not that I’m shy, I’m just careful and I didn’t want to put myself out there in a public space. But he kept encouraging me and I really felt at that point that maybe I needed to have the same courage as he did and go with it. That’s how it ended up in the collection at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). All items contributed to the bentwood box are now held at the NCTR.
What power do you think most needs to be broken?
I don’t really want to answer that question. The reason is because power in my language means something different. From the English language, I would probably say the power that needs to be broken is the belief that we are what the residential schools taught us about us, all of the stereotypes about Indigenous people. When you grow up in an institution, which I did, and you believe that you don’t have capacity, that’s a power that has a hold over you and needs to be broken.
In my language, if we talk about power it is often talked about as in physical strength. We don’t have a word for power, but we have a word for courage. We say the act of having courage. If you have that, that’s an inner power within yourself that allows you to reclaim what it is that has been taken from you in terms of ceremony, language, kinship system and land.
Talking about land, Indigenous people have always been at the forefront of defending the natural world. You also mention the importance of land in your own artwork. Is this the case for many other Indigenous artists?
Every artist that I am aware of is addressing issues of language, addressing issues of land and their personal stories or their personal troubles. I think most Indigenous artists share their stories in their art, centred on causes that are meaningful for them.
As artists, we look at things holistically, we have a tendency to address all of those things. I think that we can have one story but we tell lots of stories, or one piece has lots of stories within that one piece.
I read somewhere that we should learn about how to live with nature from Indigenous people, that this may be the only way that we can tackle problems as big as the climate crisis.
One of the things that I value as an indigenous person, as a Plains Cree woman, is the practice of protocol. When we work with the English language and our First Nation language or our original language, sometimes it’s hard to bring the truth together so that everybody can understand. In the Cree language, that idea of protocol is nacinewin.
Nacinewin is when you seek something, whether it’s knowledge from an Elder, Knowledge Keeper or a ceremonial person, you offer tobacco as a way of acknowledging your request for information. That’s following or practicing Indigenous (in my case Cree) protocol.
And that’s one thing that I think if the world understood, which is that you don’t take from the earth, from people, unless you give something before you take it, and you give thanks for that information, for that land, for that medicine, for those trees, for all of the things that we take. If we practised that I believe we would not be in the situation we are in right now.
Somebody said ‘it’s not the earth that is suffering; it’s us’. We need the birds, the wind, the insects, everything else on this land, on this earth is before us. We need all of that to survive. But we don’t understand that as human beings. And that’s part of indigenous knowledge.
People always say scientists discovered this or know this to be true… we’ve known this for centuries, we’ve known this is true and we are all keepers in indigenous teachings: some people are responsible for the air, the fire, the water and the land. That’s how we see ourselves, [as] keepers of the land, and the land is being destroyed and that means we’re not doing our job. If you’re the keeper of air and there’s pollution, you’re not doing your job.
I think the important thing is to realise in this discussion that we are holistic people and so every time we do something as indigenous people, we are considering everything, everything around us, and I think we should do the same throughout the world.
More people are aware of the ills of the world but might not know how to contribute in a meaningful way. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on what people could do in relation to Indigenous communities?
Research. Read. Look. I think the important thing for anyone is to go to the Indigenous people, read their material, read through their eyes, through that lens, because if you look through your own lens it’s always harder to really understand what is happening, or how you can respond.
For me, if somebody needs food, I give them food, you know, I just respond immediately, that’s how I was raised. Have courage to do it. What I would say is to stay away from wanting to be a saviour to the people. As indigenous people, we believe in ‘giving away’, which means you give something and you never follow where it goes, how it’s being used, and you give it with love, whether it’s energy, whether it’s money, whether it’s clothes, food, whatever it is you are giving away has to come from a place of love and that to me is how you help.
What is your favourite quote on power?
It was when Murray Sinclair who was a commissioner on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said: “the Survivors in this room, the most important gesture of reconciliation thatthey will ever see in their lives, is for you to tell them that you love them.” That to me is power. It’s giving back, giving love to the survivors, and to anybody.
[Another one is] what my mom said to me. I contributed a piece to The Witness Blanket and it was a piece that I created on the spiritual genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas, which was one of the first installation pieces that I made as an art student. I followed protocol, and called my mom. I said: “I need your help because I want to make sure that I’m doing this right,” because in our belief system we never do anything without considering how it’s going to impact the past: our ancestors; the present: our family now; and our future: our grandchildren for the next seven generations.
She sent me a letter and she said memorise the strength of tâpôkêyimoh (have belief/faith in yourself), sôhkitêhêh (be strong, have no fear), ekwa mina (and) nâkatohkêh (be respectful). To have belief, to be strong, to have no fear and to be respectful to self and others are important words about power.
If you were an animal, what would you be?
We don’t do that actually, but we have spirit names. The names are given in a place of ceremony and so in order for me to have a name I would go to ceremony and bring my protocol, my tobacco and my gifts to the Elder.
If you asked children you’d get wonderful answers. My granddaughter, was four years old and she was asked what she wanted to be when she grows up, and she said ‘I want to be a dragon.’
Who is or who are the activists you most admire?
My favourite activists are actually my grandchildren, my children, my nephews, my nieces, my mom, the Indigenous students and teachers and Survivors. The reason why they are my favourite activists is because they are living the trauma every single day and continue to be strong, to be who they are.
They are activists because they raise their children to try and help break the cycle, that to me is the daily act of healing and working towards feeling grounded on all levels of your being. That to me is activism, it’s a daily effort.
What superpower would you like to have?
I can’t answer something like that. It’s very hard for me. Again, when you’re in residential school, you’re not a child anymore, you don’t grow up being a child, you don’t have a family, you just don’t have that childhood, you become like this robot, you become a product of an institution.
So that’s difficult for me to answer.
But I have a grandson who is 6, (I have 13 grandchildren), he loves Mega Man. So he considers himself to have all these powers when he comes to visit, so that’s how I learn about superpowers, through my children and grandchildren who have wonderful imaginations.
Intergenerational trauma
If trauma is not healed, we may unknowingly pass it on to others through our behaviour. Our children may experience difficulties with attachment, disconnection from their extended families and culture and high levels of stress from family and community members who are dealing with the impacts of trauma. This can create developmental issues for children, who are particularly susceptible to distress at a young age. This creates a cycle of trauma, where the impact is passed from one generation to the next.
In a study by the University of Zurich, researchers discovered not only can extreme and traumatic events change a person, but they can also impact their children, a generation or two later, through RNA strands.
Generational trauma patterns can be depicted as a heavy chain of links, dragged (unconsciously) from one family line down to the next. And one of the greatest benefits that can be achieved by doing the inner work needed to recognise and heal is — you release your children from lugging these links into the future, thereby liberating them from the generational chain.
Source: Science Daily.
Linda’s Drawing Room
Literature
— The Knowledge Seeker: Embracing Indigenous spirituality,
Blair A. Stonechild
— Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nȇhiyaw Legal Systems,
Sylvia McAdam (Saysewahum)
— Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
— The survivors speak.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
— What we have learned.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
— Calls to action, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
— Keetsahnak: Our missing and murdered Indigenous sisters,
Kim Anderson et al.
Film
— In My Blood It Runs (2019)
Maya Newell
— nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (2019)
Tasha Hubbard
— Finding Dawn (2006)
Christine Welsh
— Mohawk Girls (2005)
Tracey Deer
— Two Worlds Colliding (2004)
Tasha Hubbard
— Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986)
Alanis Obomsawin
This content originally featured in the magazine Power, which is free to download here: http://bit.ly/CRIN-Power