Healing lodge a place to recover

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2016 (2791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Long-standing plans to construct a healing lodge on the old site of the Brandon Indian Residential School are progressing, but are also facing new challenges emerging from the painful history of the land pegged for revival.

The plan, backed by the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, is to build a healing lodge with about 30 beds on the property located on the north side of the Assiniboine River Valley, west of Brandon.

Della Mansoff, an administrator at the Dakota Oyate Lodge, has been working on the project since 2004.

Mansoff said the concept first started gaining traction 1984, but has faced several setbacks that forced the idea onto the shelf.

“This time, we will get the project completed,” she said Friday.

Mansoff, the executive director of Sioux Valley’s health centre, Margaret Roscelli, Sioux Valley Dakota Nation Chief Vince Tacan and several elders have formed a working group to help advance the project.

On Friday, several dozen people gathered under tents at the residential school site for a meeting — similar to one held this time last year.

Tacan called the day a chance to consult with survivors of residential schools and also to present their ideas to the larger Westman community.

“We’re looking at putting our people in a position where they can carry on and get on with their life,” he said.

“We have looked at best practices but (the healing lodge) will follow traditional native culture. It will not follow the 21-day basic step program that is offered in other facilties. It will be an open program, offered to meet the needs of the people that are coming to use it.”

The site will have a treatment facility with a cultural space, a museum for residential school survivors and stables for horse therapy — which is common in similar facilities in Saskatchewan but not offered in Manitoba, Mansoff said.

Currently, those from southwestern Manitoba seeking treatment for addiction must go to Winnipeg or out of the province.

Before any construction can begin, decisions must be made about a series of graves of aboriginal children — many unmarked and undocumented — discovered by Katherine Nichols, a Brandonite who will start a PhD in anthropology at Simon Fraser University this fall.

Nichols said students came from at least 13 Manitoba communities to the Brandon residential school.

The process of identifying those remains and repatriating them to their homes will be costly, said Roscelli.

“We feel that the government is responsible for the costs of doing those things. We’d look at getting them on board to assist us in doing anything that would require funding because originally, they are the ones that established the schools with the churches around them,” she said.

How exactly that process should happen will be decided on by the survivors of the school, said Roscelli.

“Once that’s done, we’ve been working at developing a rough draft blueprint (for the healing centre).”

Tacan’s plan is to apply for First Nation Urban Development Areas status for the land, which is owned by Sioux Valley, and for the Sioux Valley High School property in Brandon.

Sioux Valley is the only Prairie First Nation that has a self-governance agreement, which means the road to an “urban reserve” status may be easier to travel down than other bands

“One of the things that’s going to be beneficial to us is that we’re going to be competitive — we’re going to offer a better salary for teachers and we’ll be able to retain them. Right now, we often lose teachers to the nearby schools, or whoever has the money,” he said.

The FNUDA process has become popular across the Prairies as a way of stimulating economic activity but if Tacan is successful, he believes this will be the first time it’ll be used for a healing centre.

Doyle Piwniuk, the MLA for the area that includes Sioux Valley, sat in on the Friday meeting on behalf of Eileen Clarke, Manitoba’s minister of indigenous and municipal relations.

He said he’s been impressed with other projects that Sioux Valley has been working on.

— Brandon Sun