'Create a home for them': Indigenous-led healing village in Manitoba closer to reality
Indigenous elders welcome about 50 volunteers to help clear the land for ceremony and construction
Six years after the work to develop and build a place where women can heal from trauma, addiction and sexual violence started, the Clan Mothers are inching closer to putting their plans into action.
The grassroots organization of Indigenous elders and volunteers, are building an Indigenous-led solution called the Healing Village and Knowledge Centre. It will be built on 50 hectares of land north of Winnipeg, gifted from the Réseau Compassion Network, a charitable organization formerly known as the Catholic Health Corporation.
Volunteers came to help clear the land on Sunday, sweeping debris off of the beaches, cutting down dead trees and scrubbing out old buildings. They also helped raise a teepee in preparation for a Moon Dance to be held at the site later this month.
Surveying the volunteers ranging in age from young children to the elderly, 87-year old Elder and Clan Mothers co-founder Mae Louise Campbell told everyone, "my heart is so full."
The village, which will offer land-based healing with a focus on ceremony and social enterprise opportunities, will also give women the chance to stay as long as they need — and longer than traditional government-led trauma support programs.
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"If you had any trauma in your life you know it will not heal in one year, two years, three years. Sometimes it takes a lifetime," says volunteers that came out to help clear the land on Sunday, sweeping
The Clan Mothers' goal has been to develop and build a place where women can heal from trauma, addiction and sexual violence.
Campbell used to run the Grandmother Moon Lodge with her daughter Jamie Goulet. It was a refuge where Indigenous women could heal from multi-generational trauma.
Campbell says the girls and women were her teachers, and attributes her learnings as an elder to listening to the stories of women who suffered. But when the lodge closed, women reached out to her asking for help, and told her they had nowhere to go.
So after nearly two decades of listening, Campbell realized that something had to change.
"This is going to be different," she says. "We are going to do it our way, and our way is to create a home for them. Not a system. A home."
Healing takes time
Elder Billie Schibler says the village will address the painful trauma women experience and carry with them, pain that can lead to self-destructive behaviour and potential exploitation and vulnerability.
"The beauty of having this land gifted back to us and to be able to bring people together in a good way, in a healing way, and in a way that celebrates the beautiful spirits of our young women that need to be uplifted again," says Schibler.
Kim Trossel says she wishes a place like this existed at the beginning of her healing journey. She is a member of the Clan Mothers' Lived Experience Council, and gives the elders her personal perspective that helps shape the future of the village.
"For too long we've been put on the back burner," says Trossel.
Trossel agrees that healing takes a long time, noting that trauma is complex, and for many it's multiple layers of trauma, "starting right from childhood."
She also says that she wishes she had access to a healing village when she struggled with ongoing exploitation, citing her struggle to heal.
"It probably would have saved me a good ten years of healing," she says, adding that it must be built, "because lives depend on it."