Review of “Aboriginal
People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy”
By: Christine
McFarlane
The book “Aboriginal
People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy” is a part of the
research series books that were a part of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. As
stated in a previous post, the government of Canada established
the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) in March 1998 to address the Legacy of
Physical and Sexual Abuse suffered by Aboriginal peoples in residential
schools.
This book in particular was prepared in 2003 and written by
Madeleine Dion Stout and Gregory Kipling. Within this report “ a critical
analysis of the resilience literature is undertaken and is considered against
the cultures, lived experiences and larger social contexts of Aboriginal
survivors of residential school” (iii)
It is stated “resilience, along with its practical
applications has been studied and debated since the 1970s,” and that
“the concept is most often defined as
the capacity to spring back from adversity and have a good life outcome despite
emotional, mental or physical distress.”(iii)
The authors argue that when it comes to understanding
resilience, “risk factors, such as poverty or parental alcoholism, increase the
probability of a negative outcome. Risk can reside in the individual, family or
wider environment, with vulnerability to a negative outcome increasing
exponentially with each additional risk factor. This process is known as “risk
pile up” (iii)
They also make mention of protective factors, such as (above
average intelligence or nurturing parents) that help to counteract risk and
decrease individual vulnerability to adverse conditions, and that although
“children who experience wide ranging protective factors generally have good
life prospects as adults, positive coping strategies are difficult to sustain
against major or on-going trauma.” (iii)
Dion Stout and Kipling state that culture and resilience
intersect and help shape traditions, beliefs and human relationships and they
outline how traditional Aboriginal societies have placed great emphasis on
fostering resilience for children and youth, but that it was an oppressive
colonial experience that often cut off Aboriginal parents from such cultural
moorings.
Further outlined in this text is how resilience played a
role with the residential school experience. They state, “Status Indian, Metis
and Inuit children had varied residential school experiences, both in intensity
and duration, and that survivors have all had to contend with risk factors
related to the residential school experience."
The “Aboriginal
People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy” text can be a difficult
read because it outlines some of the behaviors that survivors had to adopt in
order to survive their experiences and how these behaviors have spilled over to
their descendants. These issues pertain to identity, culture and parenting and
have created conflicts and unresolved anger for survivors and their descendants. It also shows that despite these challenges, the resiliency nature still appears
in these individuals.
The text states that “understanding resilience can serve as a
basis upon which to plan interventions to foster greater resilience among
Aboriginal residential school Survivors,” and therefore the purpose of this particular report is to undertake a critical analysis of the resilience literature and
assess how its concepts and insights might be used to foster healing among
Aboriginal people affected by the Legacy of the Physical and Sexual Abuse
arising from the residential school system.
The role of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) was to undertake research that contributed to effective program design/redesign, implementation and evaluation of healing projects. Therefore given the growing importance attached to resilience within health policy literature the AHF commissioned this study on resilience so that the basic lay person can understand the relevance of resilience for Aboriginal individuals, families and communities dealing with the Residential School Legacy.
Specific objectives within the study include:
·
Review key concepts and theories within the
resilience literature in the context of Aboriginal people’s cultures and
experiences;
·
Assess, with particular reference to resilience,
the impact of the residential school system on Survivors and their families;
·
Identify means by which resilience enhancement
interventions might be integrated into existing approaches to residential
school healing; and
·
Formulate recommendations to serve the basis for
future AHF interventions in the area of resilience enhancement.
The AHF states that every effort has been made to ensure
that the lives of all Aboriginal peoples are reflected in this report, and that
because First Nations have received more attention in the residential school
literature than other groups, a special effort was made to also locate accounts
describing the experiences of Inuit and Metis survivors.
Lastly, they state that “one must acknowledge the absence in
mainstream discourse of the ways in which Aboriginal children and youth have
kept well and safe despite the tremendous odds imposed by the residential
school experience,”
and “several
reasons account for this oversight, including the tendency to ignore or
pathologize Aboriginal children and youth’s agency, while discounting their
natural inclination to pursue best health and life long healing strategies. In
other words, experts have failed to see, understand or interpret health and
healing experiences from the perspective of Aboriginal children and youth
themselves.
The “Aboriginal People, Resilience and the Residential
School Legacy” book was published by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) in
2003. For more information please visit the AHF website at
www.ahf.ca
