Review of "Aboriginal People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy"

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)[1]

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) [2]

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)[3]

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,” [4] 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

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[1] Aboriginal People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series. Dion Stout, Madeleine and Kipling Gregory. 2003

[2] Aboriginal People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series. Dion Stout, Madeleine and Kipling Gregory. 2003

[3] Aboriginal People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series. Dion Stout, Madeleine and Kipling Gregory. 2003

[4] Aboriginal People, Resilience and the Residential School Legacy. Dion Stout, Madeleine and Kipling Gregory. 3