Sign up for alerts

Winter 2011/12 | Vol 15 No 2

Focus

From uncomfortably numb to feeling alive

Overcoming the legacy of residential schools

By Rupert Ross

As a crown attorney serving more than 20 fly-in First Nations in northwestern Ontario for the last 26 years, I sometimes see Aboriginal youth who don’t seem to care about anything, including themselves. Some carry an anger that suddenly explodes into violence, catching everyone by surprise.

My last major prosecution is a dramatic case in point. It involved two teenage boys who hosted a party when parents were away. When an older teen made advances toward the girlfriend of one of the boys, they attacked him. For about an hour, with other young people doing nothing to stop them, they repeatedly stabbed the older teen, inflicting a fatal wound. They then dragged him outside, hid his body and returned to the house, where one of the boys had sex with his girlfriend. The police found the two boys there the next morning. Neither expressed remorse in statements to the police.

It’s easy to point to “surface reasons” for such behaviour. Extreme community and individual poverty has made some homes hugely overcrowded, forcing youth out into the community at all hours. Their homes are sometimes violent: Aboriginal spousal assault happens at five times the national average. I spoke with a young victim of child abuse who reported facing criticism from siblings: “We put up with it; what makes you so special?” It’s easy to see the attraction of intoxication, whether by alcohol, drugs, gas-sniffing or the illegal consumption of prescription medication. Who wouldn’t want to seek numbness from the pain of living in these conditions?

Over 26 years, Aboriginal healers and teachers have taught me that we need to look deeper than the surface reasons so Aboriginal communities can find their way back to health. My own journey to this awareness has been a long one that required me to be willing to move outside the narrow frame of criminal justice in which I have been trained as a lawyer. I found myself invited into the world of Aboriginal culture and healing. Aboriginal Elders and healers introduced me to a different worldview of healing and justice. Through sweat lodge ceremonies and the deep teachings of First Nations, I have come to see the problems in a different way. I have tried to acknowledge and communicate this hidden wisdom that is still carried by Elders and healers in my writings and in the frequent opportunities I have had to speak publicly about these problems and their solutions.

The wisdom of Aboriginal communities has taught me that understanding the issues some of their youth face today means understanding what happened to the five generations of children who preceded them. Many were taken to residential school at age 5 and didn’t return home until they turned 16. It takes digging deeper still, beyond any physical or sexual abuse, to the incessant denigration of everything indigenous: language, spirituality, history, family structure, community governance systems—and their individual intelligence and potential in life.

School survivors speak about the shame they were made to feel. But they seldom speak about how they dealt with that shame—or with the loneliness, anger, fear and other emotions that arose during their captivity. They may have returned from the residential 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, and so those powerful feelings remain for many survivors. In turning to the values and practices of Aboriginal culture, I have seen how healing can happen. It requires developing the emotional competencies necessary to process old and new emotions, in addition to addressing the physical, spiritual and mental dimensions.

Emotional maturation involves developing skills in labeling and interpreting emotions as they arise, in being able to talk about, monitor and manage them. Those skills most often develop during childhood, within parent-child relationships of trust and caring. But when trust and caring are not part of the emotional environment, problems arise.

One of the most thorough examinations of emotional deficits comes from Lee Brown, director of the Institute for Aboriginal Health at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. In his PhD thesis, “Making the Classroom a Healthy Place: The Development of Affective Competency in Aboriginal Pedagogy (PDF)," Brown related conversations he’d had with former Aboriginal students of an adult training program, where they regularly put course materials aside and spoke about the residential schools:

• “We weren’t allowed to cry. Because we were taught that way, it was really, really hard to cry, even laugh.”
• “I had built this wall around me … ever since I was small. I wouldn’t allow anybody into that space of mine. I think it was really hard to take that risk, letting that down and letting people in.”

They talked about having to learn to get in touch with, and then express, their feelings:

• “What (the program) really did is it gave the group permission to feel … to feel their emotions and actually express them.”
• “The big thing is opening up and trusting, being able to talk about those feelings and being able to identify those feelings.”
• “Being given permission to cry and not have to explain why you were doing it, and people supporting that, just allowing you to do that, was a new experience to me.”

In the 2008 book Aboriginal Healing in Canada: Studies in Therapeutic Meaning and Practice, Joseph P. Gone reports one man’s experience:

Growing up, we were very seldom asked how we felt about anything. Very seldom would we be asked, “Well, how do you feel?” if we were crying.… I grew up not talking about my feelings, not knowing how, not really wanting to. So I was numb in that area.

That seems to be what too many of today’s Aboriginal youth face: growing up without becoming emotionally engaged in healthy ways with their families or anyone else around them. They simply don’t know how. Sometimes, what comes out instead is anger, violence or numbness. Is it any wonder that people carrying unprocessed anger, fear and pain turn to intoxication? Gone relates the experience of another man:

That’s the reason why I turned to alcohol, to numb the pain, because that’s what it does, it numbs the pain. And so today we address social problems, and oftentimes right away we label it, “Well it’s an alcohol problem or a drug problem.” Personally, I don’t see it that way. That person has an alcohol problem for another reason, for something bigger than that.

Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, an American Aboriginal educator, perhaps said it best in a 2005 issue of Wellbriety! Online Magazine:

You shut down all feeling because you are trying to avoid the pain. It helps you get through the immediate crisis and the trauma. But if they persist, if they go on for a long time, they become a problem and you don’t feel much of anything. You numbed yourself from the pain, but you stunted your feelings, your warmth and your joy.

Lee Brown’s students spoke about the aspect of healing that involves learning to monitor and manage their feelings:

• “It is learning to listen, learning to express my feelings, express my opinion without getting angry, without getting upset.”
• “Now, if somebody bothers me I can tell them, ‘I hear what you say and I don’t think you should say that,’ whereas before I would just let you say it and forget about it. Not really forget about it, but actually it would build up inside me and then I would just blow off at the next person.”
•  “(The training program) opened doors to be able to see better, to hear better… to communicate more, more lightly or in a civil manner.”

Instead of being stuck in stunted feelings, these students started to experience warmth and joy and become aware of healthier ways to express their feelings. Aboriginal communities are developing ways to help young people—and their parents—unlock and develop the emotional potential that socio-historical factors deep below the surface have kept buried and denied.

Read part 2 of this article, which describes what Aboriginal communities are doing to help young people develop emotional competence.

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.