Sign up for alerts

Winter 2011/12 | Vol 15 No 2

Focus

More than a feeling

Aboriginal communities help youth develop emotional competence

By Rupert Ross

In “From Uncomfortably Numb to Feeling Alive: Overcoming the Legacy of Residential Schools,” I discuss the intergenerational impact of those schools on the development of emotional competencies. Residential school survivors may have returned from the schools as near-adults in the physical sense, but they never had the chance to develop the emotional competencies they needed to process those feelings properly, so for many, those powerful feelings remain. How can those adult survivors who never developed those competencies help their own children to develop to them?

Some First Nations are exploring this issue and ways to promote healthy emotional development among youth. The Seabird Island First Nation in Agassiz, B.C., suggests that “[many] of our children don’t know how to express emotions, which can lead to some behavioural challenges.… What we want to do is teach them how to express and feel emotions appropriately.” In response, the community has created its own version of the Seeds of Empathy program for pre-schoolers. (Seeds of Empathy is a program developed in Canada that fosters social and emotional competence in early education settings.)

Lee Brown, director of the Institute for Aboriginal Health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, speaks about an English class elsewhere in British Columbia that also focuses on helping children develop emotional competencies. Children scour the dictionary for words that describe emotions and discuss their differences. Each child then picks a character in the novel the class is studying and makes a paper figure to represent him or her and tapes it to the classroom wall. After each reading from the novel, students write on the front of their paper figures the words that best describe what the character might be feeling. Then they write the word that best describes whatthey themselves feel about their character’s plight on the back, where it remains private.

This elaboration of storytelling power created a dramatic improvement in the affective competencies of those children, along with an improved appreciation of literature: We are, after all, emotional creatures, and good literature not only takes us into the emotional experiences of others; it also helps us to contemplate our own.

In fact, that’s the premise upon which healing circles are built. The healing team in the Hollow Water First Nation in Wanipigow, Man., is composed primarily of people who have survived sexual abuse and are now able to speak about it. One woman, for instance, spoke about still feeling so dirty that she has to shoo her grandchildren off her knee. Another described feeling so dirty that she has to open the mirror on medicine cabinets so she can’t see her reflection.

I watched a recent sexual abuse victim listen to those stories. She began the circle in a huddled ball, her legs tucked beneath her chair, fingers curled and closed, her head down. As she listened, she seemed to uncurl, exhaling for the first time in decades. She didn’t speak during that first circle, but her body language said she was listening closely, starting the long process of learning how to dig deep inside herself, to differentiate the emotions buried chaotically there, put names to them and start ordering and talking about them. She was also learning that she was not a “freak” for feeling all those dirty, lonely, fearful things; everyone else had felt the same. This circle was teaching emotional competence.

The same thing happens with families with histories of violence at the Reverend Beardy Memorial Wee Che He Wayo-Gamic Family Healing Centre at the Muskrat Dam First Nation in northwestern Ontario. I recall asking one woman what she learned there; her simple answer was “We learned how to talk with each other.” She explained that she and her husband had grown up in drunken, violent homes, but they had never told each other. Over a five-week program, they learned that when one of them got angry, the other received that anger within their experience of threatened physical abuse and would respond in a disproportionately hostile way. The other would then do the same, escalating the fear and hostility until both were swept up in exactly the violence they feared. To escape that pattern, they needed to share their stories and learn how to explore the feelings they had hidden for so long, understand where they came from, establish trust and share their emotional lives with each other.

A Mohawk woman named Peggy Shaughnessy has approached the challenge of emotional competence more directly. Together with the Emotion and Health Research Laboratory at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., she conducted emotional intelligence assessments of 78 Aboriginal inmates of a prison in southern Ontario, examining their ability to get in touch with, identify, express and regulate their emotional states. It wasn’t surprising that the research uncovered substantial deficits. Shaughnessy then took 24 of the inmates into a 12-week program she had designed called The RedPath, which uses traditional teachings, storytelling, talking circles and ceremonies. Follow-up assessments found a “significant increase in various dimensions of emotional intelligence,” and Shaughnessy recommended that the program be used “to enhance emotional and social competencies in a variety of Aboriginal groups to deal with the cross-section of problems (addictions, violence, etc.) plaguing North American Aboriginal Communities.”

Shaughnessy has taken The RedPath program into many communities. She gives people stories, poems, pictures and movies carefully selected for ever-deeper (and likely familiar) emotional content, then holds circles to discuss them. Bit by bit, people learn to leave behind broad descriptions like “angry” and replace them with more nuanced descriptors like “bitter,” “jealous” or “disgusted.” They also develop the skills they need to create more detailed tracings of their emotional lives. Unwrapping emotions is a long process, but as people’s emotional lives become more coherent to them, their emotions become more manageable by them.

Loss of emotional competencies through five generations of emotional numbing in residential school remains a big challenge for Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples. But as various programs are beginning to demonstrate, change is possible—if we recognize the issue and make the effort.

Rupert Ross is the author of Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Aboriginal Reality (Penguin, 1992) and Returning to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice (Penguin, 1995). He has travelled across Canada doing work with the Aboriginal Justice Directorate of Justice Canada and the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada.