Conference focuses on improving healing process for aboriginals
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/10/2015 (3676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
More than 300 care providers gathered at the Victoria Inn in Brandon for the 2015 Aboriginal Mental Health and Wellness Conference yesterday.
The second annual conference, which wraps up today, focuses on enhancing knowledge and skills to create culturally safe services with and for indigenous people, according to Barry French, who is a part of the planning committee.
The conference’s tagline is “Creating a New Legacy,” and French said it aims to restore relationships across culturally diverse groups that have been damaged in the past.
“How can we move on and learn from the residential schools and from the cultural divide between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people, moving forward in a way that is going have us working together,” French said.
French, a staff training co-ordinator at Brandon Correctional Centre, said care providers across Justice, Child and Family Services, Prairie Mountain Health and more were learning about power imbalances, institutional discrimination, colonization and colonial relationships as they apply to the quality of care that is provided.
“We want to learn from it, but have to understand there is an impact that still resonates today,” French said. “How can we make change and it sounds like an easy thing to do, but it’s really difficult.”
The conference featured several speakers on a wide variety of topics.
Brenda Restoule, a registered clinical psychologist in Ontario from the Dokis First Nation, spoke about her work with indigenous populations in a federal women’s prison.
Michael Hart, from Fisher River Cree Nation, addressed child welfare, addictions and mental health. Hart is the Canada Research Chair in indigenous knowledge and social work at the University of Manitoba.
On the other end of the spectrum, musician Don Amero talked to a group of people about the power of music to heal.
Amero said his mission in life isn’t to become rich and famous like several other performers, but it is to take the listener on a journey that ends with them leaving a little more lifted.
“Music is medicine,” he said after performing a few of his songs for the audience.
» ctweed@brandonsun.com
» Twitter: @CharlesTweed