“Hope for change—change can happen” : healing the wounds family violence with Indigenous traditional wholistic practices

Today, a great deal of social services, health and education research funding is being channeled into studies on how to combat the myriad social issues—such as domestic violence, substance abuse, poverty, homelessness, suicide, homicide and incarceration— that have afflicted Aboriginal communities for eight generations. What has since been overlooked is that many of these research projects and the programs they give rise to, well meaning as they are, ultimately prove ineffective as they discount the cultural background of the people they seek to help. Intensive analysis focuses on a community program called Warriors Against Violence Society (WAVS), one of Vancouver’s few Aboriginal health organizations that runs based on Indigenous rather than Western methods of intervention for its Aboriginal members. This Indigenous Collaborative Research (ICR) framework investigates how culturally-based healing practices provide a more comprehensive and thus more effective method to assist members struggling with family violence. An Indigenous Knowledge-based intervention model for dealing with perceptions and experiences of family violence both inter-generational and contemporary emerges from transcribed conversations with 22 people, including co-founders, co-facilitators and members, amounting to approximately 600 pages of single-spaced text. Cultural practices involving storytelling, smudging, potlatches, honouring ceremonies, youth groups, Elder wisdom, natural environment and parent-to-child transference of culture signify aspects of tradition integral to Aboriginal health: all suppressed during the era of Canada’s enforced Residential School System, resulting in the disintegration of communities whose way of life was thrown off balance by colonization. When Western interventions fail to restore this balance it is worth investigating how a return to such Indigenous cultural and health practices can offer us better solutions to restore people suffering from family violence, drug addiction, poverty and homelessness, trouble with the law and traumatic memories. Key to the WAVS intervention model is that it acknowledges multiple aspects of well-being (spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual) and deals with all the factors within the history of a person, family, and/or community, which have had an impact on current health issues. Ultimately, ten emergent themes are revealed under the three categories of Total Person, Total Health and Total Environment.

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