O.T.
Here's a god-awful story about some of Inco's critics. One would think
any change would be change for the better.
thetelegram.com
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Doctor says parents must change
12/4/00
By APRIL LINDGREN,
Southam Newspapers
-Sheshatshiu
The problems of the addiction-ravaged Innu community of Sheshatshiu won’t go away until parents stop drinking and neglecting their children, says the despairing local doctor who recently decided she could no longer work with people who won’t help themselves.
“There comes a point when, as a doctor, I cannot continue to work in a dying community, where nothing I do seems to make a difference and people themselves are unwilling to take responsibility,” Dr. Jane McGillivray said in an exclusive interview with Southam News.
McGillivray, the lone doctor in this northern Labrador community of 1,250 people for more than a decade, began a leave of absence from her job at the local clinic in June.
“I have been feeling deep grief in the past months with the many deaths and alcohol-related tragedies,” the 43-year-old doctor wrote in her leave-taking letter to the Sheshatshiu First Nation. McGillivray, who continues to live in the adjacent community of North West River, said the lives of neglect, alcoholism and despair that local children have been a party to “is just not good enough. “Not for me, not for any of the children in Sheshatshiu, not for any of the adults who are presently engaging so willfully in drunkenness, debauchery and denial … “I do not know who or what will serve to bring people here to set themselves free,” the letter continues.
“I do not even know if the community will survive, or if in the next 50 years diabetes, AIDS, suicide, gas sniffing and alcoholism will just be the end of it.”
McGillivray said she decided to speak out after hearing Sheshatshiu Innu leaders’ latest demands for a detoxification centre to treat gas-sniffing children and for more money and authority to run local services. Prime Minister Jean Chretien promised all of it in the final throes of the election campaign.
National headlines
Just days before, the band council made national headlines when it asked Newfoundland authorities to place 21 gas-sniffing children in a secure detoxification centre.
The children, shown on television in Sheshatshiu’s “sniffing forest” with their faces buried in gas-filled plastic bags, are now undergoing treatment in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, about a half-hour drive away.
“This is not a problem of money or a problem of poverty,” McGillivray insists, noting that a wide range of addiction treatment programs are already available to the Sheshatshiu Innu, including a solvent abuse centre for young people, a general addiction counselling service and month-long intensive programs outside the community for anyone who wants to try to quit drinking. “This is a spiritual issue and no amount of money can heal the spirit. People have to decide to take charge of their lives, to care for their children.”
McGillivray, a warm, welcoming woman with a thick braid of rich brown hair, says historical injustices have given the Innu much to be angry about. But she denounces the community’s tendency to view criticisms of its “culture of addiction” as attacks on the Innu culture. “The addiction mindset has been protected by a cultural sham,” she says angrily, arguing that federal money sent to Sheshatshiu by the “white and guilty in the south … (often) does a flip in the financial registers and translates into bingo and booze.”
McGillivray acknowledges she may be branded a “red neck” for her views. “But I didn’t end up in a northern aboriginal community because I’m a red neck who wants to tell everybody what to do.”
Support
She has marched with the Innu as they pressed their land claims in the face of more hydroelectric development on the lower Churchill River, to protest the lack of Innu input into the Voisey’s Bay nickel development and to prevent expansion of low-level training flights out of the Goose Bay military base.
McGillivray grew up in Collingwood, Ont., the daughter of a local surgeon and environmental activist mother, and studied medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. After graduating in the early 1980s, the woman now known as Dr. Jane to Innu families throughout the area, came north to Labrador to work in Happy Valley and occasionally in Sheshatshiu. In the early 1990s, when the Innu community got funding for a local clinic, she became the local family practitioner.
The mother of two sons — nine and 11 years old — from a relationship that didn’t last, McGillivray runs a dog-sled team, canoes the Churchill River and is a founding member of the Labrador Spinsters’ Association, a tongue-in-cheek group of women making it on their own and proud of it.
Emotional losses
Six months after leaving the Sheshatshiu job, McGillivray still cries as she remembers the tragedies that fuelled her decision.
In the summer of 1999, two of her patients, a 15-year-old boy and a 27-year-old man, committed suicide. In late August, a nine-year-old girl she had helped deliver was picked up by the community crisis team. The child, who had been sniffing gasoline, was put in a building but she jumped out of the second floor window, suffering a perforated bowel. Another little girl caught on fire while sniffing gasoline and received third-degree burns to 75 per cent of her body. In early October, a 15-year-old Sheshatshiu girl, smelling of gas and suffering from abdominal pain, came into the hospital in Happy Valley where McGillivray was on call for the day. The girl aborted a 14-week fetus into the doctor’s hands during the examination. A week later, a Sheshatshiu man with a serious drinking problem was struck and killed by a car on a local road. The police were shovelling snow stained with his blood into the ditch as McGillivray drove by en route to hockey with her children. Not long afterwards, another 15-year-old boy committed suicide. “Then on Nov. 28, a little patient of mine, six-year-old Vincent Michel, burned in a fire,” McGillivray says, the tears starting almost immediately.
“I was Vincent’s doctor, I listened to his fetal heart beat when he was still inside … his mother.” The child was alone in a bedroom while his parents and their friends, some of whom had already passed out, drank elsewhere in the house. The cause of the fire wasn’t determined, but Vincent’s cries to his father for help could be heard as the house went up in flames. “Having a little child not being cared for in the middle of a Sunday afternoon is just not acceptable, it is inexcusable, no matter what culture you come from,” McGillivray says, sobbing. “I started coming home from my clinic and crying at night time and feeling overwhelmingly sad … Not very long after the fire, his parents had resumed drinking once again.”
Around that time, Sheshatshiu decided to try banning alcohol by searching all vehicles coming into the community, a ruggedly beautiful place that belies the human heartbreak in its midst. “I thought that finally the death of that little boy had woken people up,” McGillivray continued. “But people started to smuggle booze in under the seats of their cars and to bring it in through paths through the bush and laughing and joking about how funny that was. “What does that speak to when a beautiful little spirit has just died … and people think it is a joke to bring booze into the community?”
Votes for sale
The barricades, she says, came down within a month, just in time for the local band council election in early February. “During the election campaign, six or eight weeks after this little boy burnt to death, the parties started,” McGillivray says. “And every single person who got elected brought beer and liquor and bingo tickets to the community to buy votes,” she says, noting that one unsuccessful candidate for the chief’s job told her he spent $20,000 on alcohol and cash gifts.
“At what point is the moral fibre so disintegrated that you can continue to buy votes and have parties and drink beer and act as if little children aren’t dying?”
Following the election, 11-year-old Charlie Rich died after the bag of gas he was sniffing touched a candle and blew up in his face. McGillivray says before describing how the skin peeled off the child’s forearms and his trachea swelled, suffocating him.
Little interest
McGillivray says subsequent efforts to involve parents in debate about how to deal with the ongoing crisis attracted little interest.
When the Innu principal of the local school organized a meeting to explain the importance of regular attendance in a community where only about one in four children come to class, about 15 parents showed up. “At the same time, if you have a bingo and you say the jackpot is $2,000, you’d have the entire school parking lot overflowing,” McGillivray says angrily, estimating that as many as 100 parents abandon their children and go to play bingo seven nights a week.
McGillivray, who says she will only return to her job if she sees a major shift in attitude, says the issue of parental responsibility is getting more attention. “But the focus continues to be on the government’s responsibilities and the need for further funding, all of which I believe is a dangerous diversion from the real issue. “I still don’t hear a resounding chorus of voices saying people should stay home, stop drinking and take care of their kids,” she says sadly as she gives a tour of Sheshatshiu, pointing to the most recent flower-covered graves in the cemetery.
Just over a month ago, three children under the age of five burned to death in a house fire along with their grandparents who had been on a heavy drinking binge.
McGillivray’s views provoke mixed reactions.
“Jane is right,” says Anne Hurley, the Innu vice-principal at the local school. “If parents don’t take responsibility for their children, nothing will change.” Hurley’s daughter Maryanne is working with the children now undergoing detoxification: “A lot of the kids are saying they would rather stay in the treatment centre because they know they will be going back to the same situation again,” she says. “They say they hardly see their parents who are always drinking, playing bingo, playing the slot machines. They don’t see their parents changing in a positive way, they say it will take a miracle.”
Denial
Lionel Rich, whose son Charlie burned to death earlier this year, has three other gasoline-sniffing children now in detox. Rich denied his drinking has anything to do with their fate. “It’s not an issue, the issue is that they are bad kids,” he said in an interview on the garbage-strewn front lawn of his house. “I tried (to discipline them) but they won’t listen.” Sheshatshiu Chief Paul Rich, a quiet spoken man who stopped drinking more than five years ago, said the decision to seek treatment for the gasoline-sniffing children was an important first step in addressing the community’s problems.
The next goal, he said, is to put in place a detox centre right in Sheshatshiu and a wilderness family treatment centre. “We’ve always said this community must deal with its problems,” he insists, “but in order for us to deal with our problems we need to have access to the resources and the funding and the programs and the services like any other First Nation of Canada.”
Instead of being included under the Indian Act, Labrador’s Innu were left under provincial jurisdiction when Newfoundland joined confederation in 1949. Rich, who said the situation in his community is due largely to years of government neglect and deliberate efforts to eradicate the Innu culture and language, acknowledged that all the treatment programs and money in the world can’t help alcoholics who don’t want to stop drinking.
Not perfect
“We might have to get some individuals to go through a program 100 times,” he said, arguing that for this reason Sheshatshiu needs the family counselling centre and beefed up alcohol treatment programs. He also said parents’ desire to have their children returned to them after they complete the gas-sniffing detox program will encourage an end to drinking. Rich, who as a young child lost his mother and father in separate alcohol-related accidents, said that in a perfect world Sheshatshiu’s parents would look at the chaos around them and stop what McGillivray called their “drunkenness, debauchery and denial.”
“But this is not a perfect community.”
In despair over high suicide rates, the charred bodies of untended children who die in house fires and what she calls the “culture of addiction” that prevails in Sheshatshiu, Dr. Jane McGillivray earlier this year decided to take a break from her family practice in the Innu community in northern Labrador.
This is an excerpt from her Feb. 7, 2000, letter informing the Innu Nation of her decision.
I have been feeling deep grief in the past months with the many deaths and alcohol-related tragedies. Perhaps the final recognition of how impossible it is for me to continue has come with the recent election (of the six-member band council plus the chief), with so many candidates buying alcohol and bingo tickets in order to obtain votes, so many citizens’ votes for sale.
In a community with such vast negligence of children and, indeed, of the human spirit, this has been untenable for me. I have always believed in the richness and wealth of the Innu culture and Innu resourcefulness. Now it seems few people in Sheshatshiu can see what I see. The path into a future of happiness and wholeness for Innu people is something worthy of dedication and commitment. The hatred and the apathy and the anger that I see infecting almost all the people in this community and the resulting violence have disheartened me deeply. I do not support this behaviour, nor do I want to dedicate my life to enabling it ... I do not know what it will take to break the wretched hold of cruelty and neglect and apathy with which Sheshatshiu citizens hurt each other. I only know, every day for the past few months, I have cried thinking of little Vincent Michel … … (who burnt to death in a house fire while his parents were drinking), the trivial life of Nintendo and gas sniffing that he avoided by dying. Vincent is a child among many children sharing the same kind of life. It is just not good enough. Not for me, not for any of the children of Sheshatshiu, not for any of the adults who are presently engaging so willfully in drunkenness, debauchery and denial. When I first began wanting to work here, I remember (community leader) Ben Michel saying, “We don’t need you to judge us. We need you to care for us.”
I have held those words in my heart and tried my best to live with them. I can now see so clearly that the compassion that I have tried to nurture has, if anything, served to increase the victim mentality which perhaps is at the root of the problem.
Strength from the heart
Someone said: “A slave is also a person who waits for someone else to set him free.” I do not know who or what will serve to bring people here to set themselves free. I do not even know if the community will survive, or if in the next 50 years, diabetes, AIDS, suicide, gas sniffing and alcoholism will just be the end of it. I know that the strength for change comes from the heart, from each person’s heart, and not from the outside, not from people like myself, not from business, not from the government. The task of accepting responsibility for our own lives, regardless of who we are, is a great challenge. It is my challenge as well as yours. I pray to the Great Spirit that hearts open, that love flows and that the beautiful gift of the Innu is not extinguished.” |
