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The Current Transcript for March 28, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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[Unintelligible] like the most loving best place that I could while the most searing awful pain was dragged across my body like a fire flame, across my skin.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Her description of a fire flame is fitting. She's describing the pain of being branded in some kind of ceremony ostensibly confirming entry into an elite group. And when Sarah Edmondson left that group she went public alleging abuse in an organisation known as Nxivm. FBI officials swooped into Mexico this week returning with Nxivm's co-founder and charging him with sex trafficking. In a moment, Nxivm's BC connection and the story of a whistle-blower who prompted a criminal investigation. Also today.

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I just needed somebody to love me and to take care of me and to show me and guide me in a good way. Stability would have been good. I didn't need to be locked up.

AMT: She is 37 years old and she has spent more than 20 years in prison and as an indigenous woman in Canada, Amanda Lepine story is far too common from foster care, to her own children apprehended, to jail time and more jail time. Indigenous women make up less than three percent of the population and almost 40 percent of the prison population. Under Truth and Reconciliation that was supposed to change. We're asking how that will happen and when, in an hour. We're also criss crossing the globe today to consider how different cultures deal with the dead.

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They preserve their loved one's body and they keep them in the home sometimes for years. They'll bring them some some food. They'll change their clothes. There's not that fear that we have.

AMT: Caitlin Doughty is a mortician who wants to push our society to be more open about our mortality and our celebration of the lives of the dead. She takes us from here to eternity in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Arrest of alleged cult leader 'better than my wedding day,' former Nxivm member says

Guests: Kathleen Goldhar, Josh Bloch

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VOICE 1: [Singing] This is the best day of my life, this is better than their wedding day. Thanks.

VOICE 2: What's the story?

VOICE 1: He got arrested. He was in Mexico and he got taken from Mexico and he's holding in Texas and he's going to be brought to Brooklyn.

AMT: Well that was Sarah Edmondson's reaction to news that a man named Keith Ranieri was arrested Monday. Keith Raniere is the head of a group called Nxivm, a purported self-help group based in Albany New York. According to the FBI he's a dangerous sex offender who has a longstanding history of what the FBI says is "systematically exploiting women through coercive practices for his own financial and sexual benefit" end. And Sarah Edmondson mentions Mr. Raniere was arrested in Puerto Vallarta Mexico after a month long search by the FBI. He was found at a ten thousand dollar a week luxury villa. She says this is the result she had hoped for after what had ended up being what she describes as the most tumultuous year of her life. The Current's producer Josh Bloch and the current executive producer Kathleen Goldhar has been on assignment working on a podcast about Sarah Edmondson and Nxivm. They're in the studio with me now. And just a warning some of what you are about to hear might be disturbing to some listeners. Hello Josh and Kathleen.

JOSH BLOCH: Well.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Good morning.

AMT: You can hear just how excited Sara is in that clip. What does Keith wearies arrest mean for her?

JOSH BLOCH: I don't think she can believe it yet. So Sarah's one of the whistle-blowers she came forward with her story last year and it made this huge splash on the New York Times. She left after being branded with Keith Raniere's initials on her pelvis.

AMT: Branded? Like they do with cattle?

JOSH BLOCH: Yes. Yes. Essentially her skin was burned with his initials and the remarkable thing is that Sarah wasn't the first person to go to authorities and complain about Keith Raniere and Nxivm. But it seems like the details of the branding were so disturbing it spurred the FBI into action. And right after the story was published they started investigating.

AMT: Now Josh she's a friend of yours, isn't she?

JOSH BLOCH: Yes yes. We actually met in daycare. We were two years old, went to summer camp together, we travelled together and then we kind of lost touch for a number of years about 15 years. And then this past summer I ran into her on an island off the coast of B.C. and she told me this crazy story. She said- what she told me was 'I think I've just left a cult'.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And Anna Maria I got to give Sarah a lot of credit. I mean we heard from a lot of people who were so frustrated by the authorities. They said that for years they just seemed to ignore the serious complaints that they were lodging against them, against Keith and against the organization Nxivm. And I think it took Sarah going public with her horrible story about being branded that really made this happen.

AMT: So what is Nxivm?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So Nxivm is a self-help group. That's part of the human potential movement. The group described itself on its website as a professional business providing educational tools coaching and training to corporations and people from all walks of life. So it started in 1998 in Albany New York where most of the inner circle of the organisation live today. They've had high profile members including two members of the Bronfman family who as you know are heiresses to the Seagram family fortune and it's reported that the Bronfman sisters have gifted as much as 150 million dollars to the group.

AMT: Well what was Sarah's involvement with the group?

JOSH BLOCH: So Sarah actually ran the Vancouver centre of the executive Success program which is what Nxivm calls its slate of personal and professional development workshops. And she was a star recruiter for them. She told me that she recruited 2000 people into the organisation. And the executive Success program is set up like a multi-level marketing company so she would make a commission on every person she recruited. And at one point she was making twenty thousand dollars a month.

AMT: So what is Keith Raniere charged with?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well what we know is from an FBI complaint that was unsealed on Monday. And it says Keith Raniere is charged with sex trafficking and forced labour. And sources are telling us that there might be more coming.

AMT: Okay so these are pretty serious charges.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Very serious. He's facing a minimum of 15 years in prison if he's found guilty.

AMT: So how does Nxivm go from a self-help group to allegedly being involved in sex trafficking.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's complicated. So to understand we have to explore the group a bit more. Most people involved in Nxivm took courses like the one Sarah was offering at the Vancouver centre. So for an example you take a five day intensive that they said helped you with interpersonal skills and achieving your professional goals. That was the extent of people's involvement. It kind of ended there. But the FBI alleged that Keith Raniere created a secret group within Nxivm called DOS. So that's DOS and that stands for 'Dominant Over Submissive'. Women who were already part of Nxivm were recruited. They were recruited under the false pretence that they were joining a women only mentorship group. They were told that it would take their trading to a totally new level. So what the FBI allege is that Keith was actually the head of DOS and that he was recruiting women to be his sex slaves.

AMT: His sex slaves.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: His sex slaves. That's what the U.S. government is saying. But he wasn't the only one with slaves allegedly. So DOS's set up like a pyramid scheme where one woman was recruited by another woman and that they would have to call the woman who recruited them their master and they would be their slave. And at the same time that so-called slave would have to recruit their own slaves.

AMT: Wait a minute. How do they even agree to this? How do they let it happen?

JOSH BLOCH: It's all really astounding. But first of all keep in mind that someone like Sara had been in Nxivm for 12 years. So it's a really slow process. And by the time she's invited to join DOS she's fully indoctrinated, she's told us, into what Nxivm wants its members to think. Also another important thing is that Sarah is recruited into DOS by one of her best friends. So someone she trusts really plays off the relationships that women already have with each other. Sarah told me that her friend described it to her as a kind of Freemason's for women and that Sarah shouldn't think of it like a master-slave relationship but more like the master represents a devotion to something outside yourself. Here's what Sara told us about the recruitment.

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First thing she said was: "How committed are you to your growth?" I like "hundred percent". And then she said: "I want to invite you to something that's so cool. It's a little bit strange but it's something that completely has changed my life more than anything I've ever done [unintelligible], totally transformed everything in a very short period of time and I want to invite you to it. It is a very special invite only"

AMT: OK but tell me how this becomes an issue of sex trafficking.

JOSH BLOCH: Okay so allegedly Keith is at the top of this whole thing and he's ordering members of DOS to tell their slaves to have sex with him. But beyond, that there's an added layer of coercion. So to join DOS the women have to give over several pieces of collateral including things like a nude photo or a video confession. Sarah told me that she gave a video confession falsely accusing her husband of abusing her. And in the FBI complaint another DOS member actually gave up custody to any future child to Keith if she left the group.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So not complying with an order or leaving the group your collateral could be released. Even if you told others about the existence of DOS, you are at risk of being exposed and in today's digital age it's not hard to understand that fear.

JOSH BLOCH: So Sarah joined and part of the initiation was for her to get a mark on her body to symbolise her lifelong commitment.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The interesting thing here is that Sara never really liked the idea of the mark. That's what she told us. Even when she thought it was going to be a small tattoo that would be hidden. She resisted at first. But what we discovered is that a big part of Nxivm's teaching is that they use those moments where people are uncomfortable or they're questioning and they turn it around to make it to be about you. And it becomes something you need to work on. It's actually quite ingenious because people in Nxivm stopped trusting their own instincts.

JOSH BLOCH: We spoke to Sarah about the branding. It's really hard to listen to. But here's a small part of what she told us.

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: The first time she holds it over, she's holding it over her skin and the first touch of it like - now keep in mind the first line that she's tracing is about two inches. She takes the cutter and it just touches the- like just touches her skin and she jumps. Like her whole body like jumps off the table like like like of like a dying fish like she's just flops and flips and like screams. And now she has this like little hole of burnt flesh where the tip of the cutter as it [unintelligible] has cut her.

AMT: I got to tell you this makes my skin crawl. It now it's alleged that Keith Raniere knew about this the whole time.

JOSH BLOCH: Not only did he know about it, according to the FBI complaint Keith was directing it. And it also turned out that the branding - which Sarah was told was going to be the symbol representing the four elements earth, wind, fire and water - it was actually Keith Raniere's own initials K.R. And when she figured that out it was a big wakeup call and that was really the beginning of the end of her involvement with Nxivm. She left in June of last year.

AMT: Okay so this is pretty disturbing and it's pretty fascinating too but I want to know more about this guy. So who is Keith Raniere?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well first of all, all the members of Nxivm are required to call him the Vanguard

AMT: The Vanguard.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The Vanguard. And according to his Web site Keith Raniere or the Vanguard has an IQ of 240. He proclaims that he is one of the smartest men in the world. He was speaking in full sentences by the time he was one, reading by the age of two. He has claimed that he is a concert pianist and a judo champion. But I mean it's all questionable certainly now.

JOSH BLOCH: I really like this line from the FBI filing. They say: "He frequently cited having earned three degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. But a review of his transcripts show that he graduated with a 2.26 GPA. Having failed or barely passed many of the upper level math and science classes he bragged about taking".

AMT: So what made him so special? How could he convince these women to do all this?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well everyone we talked to said Keith is extremely charismatic, that he's an excellent listener and that when he's talking to you it feels like nobody else is in the room. He's also been described as very funny and a great public speaker. Physically I have to admit it's a little hard to understand. He's not exactly Brad Pitt. So there must be something to meeting him in person.

AMT: So has Keith Raniere or anyone at Nxivm responded to these charges now?

JOSH BLOCH: We did put in calls to the Nxivm offices but no one has responded to us. We actually went down to Albany and tried to speak to Nxivm officials but we had no luck. The only response to any of this controversy came after Sarah went public last year and Keith Raniere posted a response on the Nxivm Web site where he denied any involvement in DOS which he called a sorority and not part of Nxivm.

AMT: So what happens now?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York wants Keith Raniere to face trial in Brooklyn. So we're going to be keeping an eye on that to start. And there's also the question of what's going to happen to Nxivm the organization. When Sarah left Vancouver Centre a large number of people left with her. We've been told that Nxivm membership has dropped a lot since the scandal broke. But on Monday night the Mexican contingent put out a press release saying that they believe Keith Raniere is innocent and it's business as usual there.

AMT: Pretty fascinating but there's a lot more to come, huh?

JOSH BLOCH: That's right. We're hard at work on our podcast and we'll definitely let people know when it's going to come out.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I have a little bit of pull here so it might be announced on this show.

AMT: Okay Kathleen and Josh thank you.

JOSH BLOCH: Thank you

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thanks Anna Marina

AMT: That was The Current's executive producer Kathleen Goldhar and The Current's producer Josh Block with me in our studio. Their podcast series Uncover on Nxivm is a co-production between CBC News and CBC original podcast it's coming soon. And if you want to get episodes of the series you can subscribe now on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Daniel Shaw is a psychoanalyst and licensed clinical social worker who worked with people who have left these kinds of groups, including working with former members of Nxivm. We reached Daniel Shaw in New York City. Hello.

DANIEL SHAW: Good morning.

AMT: What does the arrest of Keith Ranieri and the subsequent charges related to allegations of sex trafficking say to you?

DANIEL SHAW: Most importantly it says that this man's alleged abuses will no longer be happening, that people will not come under his influence and be subjected to the kinds of abuses that he's been accused of. It's also unusual. Cult leaders or leaders of these kinds of communities are rarely brought to justice even though many members or former members will try to complain about them or even set up a member websites.

AMT: And you use the word 'cults'. Nxivm denies that it is a cult. But you have been working with former members of Nxivm for a while along with other former members of groups like this. How did this come about?

DANIEL SHAW: Well I was a former member of the group myself. I was a full time kind of missionary in a religious group in the 80s and early 90s. I left in 1994 just as I was beginning my graduate degree in social work and subsequent psychoanalytic training. So I had very upfront you know personal close up view of the kinds of abuses that occur in these kinds of communities. And I began to look into the idea of narcissism because I couldn't understand first of all how did I become a follower. I was a pretty functional guy and pretty smart and a little bit cynical even. And I also really wanted understand the psychology of these kinds of people that lead these groups.

AMT: So when you meet with people who are leaving these kinds of groups, what shape are they in?

DANIEL SHAW: Those who get drawn in closeness to the inner circles are often the most stunned. They're in a kind of shock and it's very much like post-traumatic stress disorder that you see with people who've been in combat. Because in fact life in these groups is a life of being under constant assault. You're constantly being told you're not working hard enough, you're not giving enough, you need to do more and recruit more. Many people have panic attacks when they leave. Others just profoundly feel so profoundly stigmatised and shamed. So in the group they've been subjected to constant shaming and humiliation. You know this is what these leaders do. They seduce them, they intimidate, they belittle and humiliate. This is the means of control. When you leave you feel another kind of shame because now you're in a wider world that has no idea how to understand why you got yourself into this kind of thing.

AMT: Well let me ask because you know you make the point that people are under pressure to recruit. I mean how complicit are the people who leave in actually bringing other people into the very thing they're trying to escape. Isn't that the conundrum sometimes?

DANIEL SHAW: It sure is. You know the whole point of a group that I would think of as a cult is the self-aggrandisement of the leader. So you know other groups have charismatic leaders might actually function to succeed in fulfilling ambition. But the only mission in a cult is the glorification, the deification of the leader. So when members leave, those who were heavily involved will have a tremendous amount of guilt about the recruitment efforts they made. They did it in good faith but little by little their boundaries were violated and they were encouraged to begin to violate the boundaries of others. And this is a source of shame and guilt which really needs to be worked through.

AMT: And you make the point that you weren't the kind of guy who could get pulled into something like this but you were. So how do you help people move forward? What are the factors that determine someone's ability to kind of move on from a life where they have given up freedom?

DANIEL SHAW: People need to recover their dignity. They have really been way stunned and shocked and abused and controlled in ways that have left them feeling as though they've lost their dignity. And that takes time, that takes effort and people are confused they need to try to sort things out. In my work one of the things that I help people do is not just understand why they were victims. Anybody can be a victim. Anybody can be susceptible at a particular moment in time. But what's important to understand is that the leader- Often people who leave themselves are still unable to believe that their leader doesn't have the kind of power that they gave him, that they projected onto him. And so they feel terrified. They feel small and they need to gain their own sense of subjectivity, their own sense of themselves and their dignity. That often takes time.

AMT: Daniel Shaw we have to leave it there but thank you for your insights.

DANIEL SHAW: Thank you.

AMT: Daniel Shaw; psychoanalyst and licensed clinical social worker who works with former cult members. He mentioned his writings. He's the author of Traumatic Narcissism Relational Systems of Subjugation. And Daniel Shaw joined us from New York City. Let us know what you think of this story. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook, go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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AMT: The CBC News is next. And then as a funeral director Caitlin Doughty is often face to face with death. After travelling the world to see how other cultures deal with the reality of dying she thinks maybe we should be face to face as well. Caitlin Doughty is my guest after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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How 'death doulas' and home funerals are changing the way we grieve

Guest: Caitlin Doughty

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come. Indigenous women make up less than three percent of the Canadian population but almost 40 percent of the female prison population. Reducing that number was a recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, nearly three years ago. A CBC investigation into whether any progress is being made highlights the journey of Amanda Lepine and we'll hear her story. But first, life's last act.

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And he took these three little short breaths and he died. And it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life to be there and to be in a space with him. You know there's this little window that opens when someone is dying. And for me it's like the window that opens when a baby's born. Everyone who's around that world knows that something incredible is happening. I mean really the veil is open and so that happened then. How precious and beautiful it was.

AMT: Well that is Sarah Kerr in Calgary. She describes herself as a death midwife or a deaf doula. She helps families navigate the dying process both before and after a person's last breath. And she advocates for a more hands on approach in caring for a loved one after death. After her own father died last April she and her family chose to look after his body themselves.

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So we watched his body and I know I spent a long time rubbing lotion into his arms and his legs and really just tending to him, almost like a newborn. Laid about in his bed and made him as comfortable as we could I guess. And then I spent the rest of the night sleeping beside him, pulled up a chair. And it was an incredible and incredible evening every once in a while I'd wake up and look over and there he'd be. We spent two - almost three days with his body and we're really grateful to the nursing home that they let us do that. We never left him alone. So over those three days there was always someone in the room with him and that felt important. It felt like there was some way we were holding the space for him to get to wherever he needed to go next, whatever that might be. It takes a long time to adjust. I mean I knew he was going to die. I knew he was dead. I had seen him die. And it took a couple of days before I finally- My first thought when I looked at his body was that he's dead. And that sinking in felt like a real gift. I know often people don't have that time with the bodies that people love and it takes a long time to really register that this thing that we didn't want to have happen, that we can't believe has happened, has happened. The girls brought their instruments. We sang. We laughed. We sat and planned the funeral. We pulled up pictures. It was just this time where it would have been silly to pretend that things were normal because things weren't normal. My dad was dead. So we brought him down the hall and we had one more ceremony outside and then we loaded him into the back of my sister and brother in law's minivan. And the next day there was this incredible moment. The funeral director who was there and was lovely, he left our hands and the funeral director took the coffin and the wheels and his body and it was it was this physical shock to my body the sense that I was letting him go. And it was - it was such a deep experience and one that had to happen. This whole process is about letting go. But we were able to do it slowly enough. And this was the next step. But it was a really significant one. It was really important for us to be so hands on with my dad's body because he's ours.

AMT: Well that's Sarah Kerr she's part of a movement to make the rituals around death more prominent in our lives, to bring discussion of dying out in the open. One of the movement's main advocates is Caitlin Doughty. She's the founder of an organisation called The Order Of Good Death a group made of funeral industry professionals academics and artists who want to push our society to be more open about our mortality. Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, a funeral home owner and a death awareness advocate. She's written a book called From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death. And she joins us from Los Angeles. Hello

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Hi. It's a pleasure to be here.

AMT: What do you think when you hear a story like Sarah Kerrs?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Well it's beautifully done. She told a beautiful story and it also feels so universal to the stories we've been hearing in the last five, 10, 15 years of people in this movement who are saying 'I'm not having the funeral home shriek in at the dead of night with a van and taking dad away before I even get a chance to hold his hand. I'm not going to do that I'm going to sit here and I'm going to wait until I'm ready to let him go'. Insisting on that is a powerful almost revolutionary act in today's culture.

AMT: Some people might shudder at the idea of someone preparing their own father's body for a funeral. Why do you think so many people are creeped out by that?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Well what I tell them is that 100 years ago everyone did that. When someone died you died in your home and your family took care of you. And in the past 100 years it's become a business, it's become an industry. And if you're one of those people who say 'I'm totally comfortable with that. I don't want to see the dead body'. That's your right. The industry is there to support you in that. But if you're someone who says 'Wait a minute. I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with the status quo', that is also completely safe, completely legal and completely available to you.

AMT: Is it dangerous or unhygienic to look after a body outside a funeral home?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: That's a myth that we hear a lot. It's definitely not dangerous. There are a few situations where say the body had some wildly infectious disease, but for example Sarah Kerr's father did not have Ebola. In that situation the body is 100 percent safe to be around. In fact it's safer to be around than a living body.

AMT: And she said that they stayed with her dad's body for three days. Bodies don't start decomposing or what happens?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: They do. There's subtle decomposition. A good friend of mine did a home funeral. We call home funeral or staying with the body for her brother in law who died very young. And what she said was on the third day they definitely started to notice a subtle smell but it didn't matter because this was their person and they loved him. But there, you know, there's no time frame. You can stay with your dad for two hours. You can stay with your dad for three days, whatever it is that feels right to you. But you know if you're going to keep the body after about 12 hours, 24 hours, you probably want to think about how to best cool down the body.

AMT: Why did you travel the world looking at different funeral practices?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I did it because I wasn't happy with what I was seeing in North America. It's not that we have a terrible evil funeral industry. We have kind of a system, we have great funeral directors working in a system that is not set up for the family to have a really intimate beautiful experience. And when I would tell people about other places around the world, for example rural Indonesia where they keep the body sometimes in the home for years, I would get this reaction of 'Oh that's horrifying. That's disgusting. How can you not let them rest in peace'. And I wanted to break down that idea and have a little cultural relativism and say hey maybe to them what we do is really weird where we chemically embalm the body and hide it away underground immediately.

AMT: Well talk to me a little bit more about Indonesia because you went to a place called Tana Toraja. It's a region in Indonesia. They do have radically different practices from what we do in North America. Take us through a little bit of that.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Sure I call it the holy grail of corps interaction. It's really just about the most polar opposite to North America that you can imagine. And what they do is they preserve their loved one's body and they keep them in the home sometimes for years after the person dies. They often interact with them. They'll bring them some food. They'll change their clothes. They'll sleep in the same room if they need to. And then beyond that after the body does transition and finally go to a separate grave, they have a ceremony every three years or so where will continue to bring out the mummy, redress them, clean them, update them on goings on in the village and then put them back in for the next time.

AMT: So they really revere them.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: They revere them and they consider the ongoing relationship with the dead very very important.

AMT: But I have to tell you. I mean you also talked about meeting someone who said he slept in the same bed as his dead grandfather for seven years.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Yes.

AMT: That is not going to stop me [unintelligible] no.

[Laughter]

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Not for you. And I think when I talk about this place in Indonesia, my advocacy is not 'You too can sleep with your grandfather in the same bed for seven years'

AMT: Mummified grandfather, we should point out.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Mummified grandfather, yes. If you're just tuning in, mummified grandfather. But what we can do is look at that situation and say if they can keep grandpa in the home for seven years I probably don't have to freak out after two minutes when he dies.

AMT: Yeah it is a way to learn there are other ways you. You actually also looked closer to home in Colorado. What did you see in Colorado?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: In Colorado there's this small small small town against the mountains called Crestone. And what they've done there is they've gone outside the normal funeral industry. They will cremate the body on an open air pyre and it's the only open air pyre public one in the western world. They lay the shrouded body on top of this beautiful wood under the dome of blue Colorado sky and set it alight. And it's just absolutely gorgeous.

AMT: How open was the community to having a public funeral pyre?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: You know at first they were not happy. They were very 'are we going to see the burning bodies reflected in dark smoke through the sky on the horizon. There's going to be particulate matter, is it going to be dangerous?' There were a lot of concerns and rightly so these people had never had a open air funeral pyre in their town before. But what this group did is they just systematically answered their concerns with science with experience. And now everyone is excited to sign up their advance directive and sign up for the pyre. And that's just become part of the fabric of the town.

AMT: So why do you think that is? Why would get something that would be at the beginning so very different is embraced?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: That's how death works. Something that we're just now starting to do is something called alkaline hydrolysis and alkaline hydrolysis uses high heat water and potassium hydroxide to essentially flash decompose the body. And what you're seeing now are headlines like 'flushing grandma down the drain'. But 20 years ago those exact same headlines were used for cremation. When something new is introduced you're always going to get people who are deeply afraid. But once you actually see it and it's meaningful and it's beautiful you change hearts and minds.

AMT: And of course we were putting grandma on the ground with the worms before. So, I mean if you can conjure an image I guess you want, right?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Exactly. I think that's the point is like have you seen the inside of a cremation machine? Have you seen an embalming room? You know death can get a little weird and grotesque no matter how you're doing it.

AMT: Well let's move on to Japan then because you visited columbarium. I'm I saying correctly?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Correct yes.

AMT: A building that houses cremated remains which was very different again from death practices elsewhere. What did that look like?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: It's thousands of Crystal Buddhas and the cremated remains are behind the Buddhas. And you go in and you have a tap card similar to a subway card and you go 'boop boop boop' at the entrance and it connects up with your dead person. And the whole wall of Buddha's lights up glows and your loved one's Buddha will pulse a different colour than the rest of the world. And you're like this might be sort of tacky it might be sort of a Vegas like show. And then they turn it on and it's so cool. You feel held in this. You feel like you're part of something. And technology is what has allowed that feeling to happen.

AMT: How is a traditional Japanese cremation different from ours?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: They come and they watch the body be loaded into the cremation machine, which we can also do in North America. It's called a witness cremation. And what they also do though is that they are there when the body is pulled out. And when we think of cremated remains or ashes we think of this fine powder. Right. But in actuality it's bones, brittle bones that the funeral director will then grind down. So the family in Japan will surround this skeleton and starting at the feet they use chopsticks to pick up the bones one by one and place them into an art. It just seems like another beautiful intimate ritual to me a way to have a kind of finality. Because what I really believe that we're missing right now in our rituals is the lack of rituals. You don't have anything physical or meaningful to do when someone dies. The funeral director picks Dad up speeds away with him. Maybe you see him in some kind of wake where you walk by him and tap his hand sort of awkwardly and that's it. There's nothing physical to do. And that's why it's so beautiful to have a home funeral because you can wash the body, hold their hand, put on their favourite sweater. And it's my belief that that helps you - you don't get over your grief but it moves you along in the process of accepting that you're in grief.

AMT: It's like we heard from Sarah it is that letting go.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Exactly it's a feeling of physically being able to move through a very sometimes painful and dark mental barrier

AMT: I want to talk about the day of the dead in Mexico. It really is a world famous event now for its colourful costumes and festivities. What did you learn about cultural attitudes toward death in Mexico?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: They are able to continue the relationship with death. There was a beautiful grave of a young baby that was still decorated with candles and food and flowers, twenty years after the baby had died. They were saying out loud when you lose a child it's not something that you just forget about. And they were allowed to publicly come out and say 'hey I'm still grieving. I'm not over this'. And that's not a thing, most of our workplaces if we're not over it in a week we're a liability.

AMT: It's a point. I mean the grieving doesn't end for the loved ones. It's just that people around them don't see it or want to see it or we build a society that wants them to move forward when in fact they need to be in the grief.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: They do. And one of the nicest thing that you can do is if you know that a friend has someone died this year, even if it was nine months ago I promise you they haven't forgotten that their husband died. And you don't have to force them into a conversation about it but just a simple 'Hey I know it's been a really tough year for you. How are you doing?' lets them know that people still recognise that there's still pain there and that if they want to talk about it they are allowed to.

AMT: Well and of course this is why how we are with a body after death matters. What do you think we've lost in North America by taking a less active role after the death of someone we love?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I think that you lose this incredible experience. You lose this amazing space to let things change for you. You have this space to just think about the fact that this person this physical person in front of you is not alive anymore and except that. You have this space to think about the fact that you're going to die someday. What does that mean?

AMT: Well you're a funeral professional but you don't have a lot of time for the traditional profession of the funeral business.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Yes. I don't have a lot of time for the traditional funeral home. Yes. I respect the work that funeral directors do. And it's a hard hard, oftentimes thankless job. But the system that we're in is not particularly helpful for families. I don't believe. And so at my funeral home we don't offer embalming. We don't offer conventional burial which is burial in a big casket in a thick concrete vault. We offer things like home funerals. We let you come in and see and be a part of the cremation if you'd like to and we offer what's called natural burials which is just a hole in the ground and a shrouded body. And honestly I think that's the future. I think a lot of people are going that way and there's a lot of people doing really good work to make sure that's available for you when the time comes.

AMT: Well we contacted the funeral service Association of Canada to ask about the role of funeral professionals. And I've got a clip here. This is Yves Berthiaume. He is the president of the association listen to him.

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As much as a family wants to be involved, they could be quite involved pretty much ends and ends with the funeral home. We did that when my mom passed away a year and a half ago. We brought her back to her home and she was with us for an evening. We had dinner with her and then we brought her back. Could that be done? Sure. To be honest also it's not a big percentage of family requesting to be involved and to all aspect of the funeral. The advantage of using a funeral home is you have now a professional who, by law, has license to help you. It's a troubled time. You need people of that time to guide you

AMT: Caitlin Doughty is there an advantage and a time of grief to handing some of the process over to someone who knows how to take care of a body and make a funeral run smoothly?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Yes and no. First of all I'm really happy to hear them say that that you know it should be available to work with your funeral home to create that experience. That's increasingly the case. I will say just as a small response that oftentimes when families go in and they suggest something like that what they're being told is 'No no no you can't do that brink. Bring the body into the funeral home'. So I appreciate them saying that so clearly. I think it depends on where you are as to whether it's important to have a funeral director. Sarah's story about putting her father in the back of her family's minivan was amazing. That's a lot harder to do someplace like Los Angeles where I work. It's almost impossible to file a death certificate if you're a family without a funeral directors help. There are some ways where it's still really really hard to do things without an expert in the logistics of funerals. But even if you decide to use a funeral director you can still get a lot of mileage emotionally out of being more involved.

AMT: What made you think about all this? What drove you to actually look at this and to make this available for others?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I had a difficult experience when I was a child. When I saw another small child fall off a balcony at my local mall and it was really traumatic for me. And I always had a weird relationship with death and I started working in a crematory 10 years ago. I liked what I saw in that it was incredible and a huge honour to be with the dead in their final moments. But it also became very clear to me very quickly that it was just me there. Why was it just me? I was some random 23 year old girl. Why was I the one who was doing this ritual action in their final moments?

AMT: What would be your ideal funeral to hold in your funeral home?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I think it's a family who's really had a good open conversation and it's probably somebody who wants to keep mom in the home, wants to call us when they're ready they have a lot of questions but they don't even necessarily need us to be there. That's something that's been really surprising to us. We thought we were going to have to be there to help. Not true. A lot of families say 'No we got it. As long as you give us the information on the legalities we're ready to take over. We pick them up when they're ready and then maybe we drive out to the natural burial ground. And the family themselves puts the dirt onto the body and they disappear into the desert and the family just feels like they were involved and present through the entire process

AMT: What do you want to happen to your body when you die?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I'm very excited about decomposing. It's not really available in the US but I would love to be laid out to be eaten by animals. I think that I have eaten animals throughout my life and they should have their turn with me. That's probably not going to happen. But in that case I'm excited about just a natural burial. Just go back to the land that I came from.

AMT: Everyone who loves you knows this right?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: They do. Yes I have an updated death plan that I emailed to some close colleagues and friends and my mother. I encourage you to send a death plan e-mail to all your friends and family although maybe make clear what a death plan is in the subject line. Don't just send him an email that says Death plans that could go bad.

AMT: Yes exactly. So what does thinking about death and planning death and being okay with deaths due to your life?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I think it makes you a more self-aware person. We need people to be more aware that the deadlines emphasis on dead, that death imposes on our existence are what make us strive to have children, to get married, to host a radio show. And we need to be aware of death and what it does to us and not try and deny it as much because that is not helping us as a culture.

AMT: Caitlin Doughty thanks for your ideas and your thoughts.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: Yea pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

AMT: Caitlin Doughty; mortician, funeral home owner and death awareness advocate. Her latest book is called From Here To Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death. She joined us from Los Angeles. Let us know what you think as you are what you are thinking as you were listening to that. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. Do we need to change our rituals around death in our society? In our next half hour Indigenous female and incarcerated. One woman's story of too many years behind bars and the challenge to avoid the same fate for others. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why are Indigenous women disproportionately represented in federal prisons?

Guests: Chantelle Bellrichard, Promise Holmes Skinner, Kelley Blanchette

AMT: Hi I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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We call upon the federal provincial and territorial governments to commit to eliminating the over-representation of Aboriginal people in custody over the next decade and to issue detailed annual reports that monitor and evaluate progress in doing so.

AMT: Well that is Senator Murray Sinclair who headed Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was three years ago this June that he and the commission made that call to action. It was one of 94 actions recommended to - in the words of the commission - redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the progress of Canadian reconciliation. But that specific issue was something advocates have been calling on the government to address for decades. In a report last year Ivan zinger, Canada's Correctional Investigator, revealed that while Indigenous women make up less than three percent of the population, they account for 38 percent of the women in prison. Women such as Amanda Lepine

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Producer: Can you describe where we are right now?

AMANDA LEPINE: We are sitting on the ferry. I am going back to jail but it's part of my journey being able to be outside the walls and letting go of all that chaos and the aggression and everything else that comes with it. It is just depressing being inside there. So being able to get that reminder that there is life beyond those walls, I'm very grateful for that.

AMANDA LEPINE: Amanda Lepine is a 37 year old Metis woman. She's the mother of three and an inmate at the Fraser Valley Institution for Women, that's a federal prison in BC. She spoke with the CBC Chantelle Bellrichard as part of a special investigation into those 94 recommendations from the truth and reconciliation commission to determine how much progress has been made in implementing them. Chantelle Bellrichard's research is looking specifically at the issue of over-representation of Indigenous women in custody and she joins me from our Vancouver's studio. Hi.

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Hi.

AMT: How did you come to be on a ferry with Amanda Lepine?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yes I was introduced to Amanda last month through a contact I made while I was researching the story and they sent me an email said that Amanda wanted to talk. So I had to move quickly. Amanda was just coming to the end of a 40 day drug and alcohol treatment program on Vancouver Island so she was actually getting sent back to prison in Abbotsford. And the day we met was her last day out and we did the interview huddled together up upstairs on the upper deck of a B.C. ferry heading back to Vancouver.

AMT: And what was she like that day, Chantelle, knowing that she was going back to prison?l

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: It was a pretty emotional day for her. And as you can imagine there's this really stark contrast when you go from this treatment centre on Vancouver Island, it's overlooking the ocean, it's beautiful, you are surrounded by all these people who are really supportive of what you're doing. And then she knows she's going back to the prison, in Abbotsford where the guards, the strip searches, you know the fence with razor wire around it. And she said that while she was at this treatment centre she had let down a lot of her defences and so she was really psyching herself up to get back into prison.

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I think it's going to be like going back to jail for the very first time again because I've done a lot of work myself and I let those barriers down and I allowed myself to trust people again and make those friendships and have that laughter, everything that I didn't when I was there. I was a serious person when I was in there. And these past six weeks like I've learned to love my life and learn to love myself. So going back in there I don't know what I'm walking into. You know it's an aggressive environment. There's that depression. There is that hate from the guards. It's us against them. And I just don't want to pick up all that negative energy again because I just dumped it.

AMT: So what's her story. How did she end up in prison?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Amanda is currently serving an eight and a half year sentence actually for her role in an armed robbery that happened in Winnipeg back in 2015. And I should mention about that robbery there's a Winnipeg police report from the time and it says nobody was physically hurt, but there were weapons that were used and cash and cigarettes were stolen.

AMT: Eight and a half years is this her first experience behind bars?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: No. No it's not. Amanda told me she's actually been locked up for 23 years of her life and she's only 37. And that includes another federal sentence that she did and that was for an armed robbery of a convenience store and a gas station also in Winnipeg.

AMT: 23 years in prison and she's 37 years old.

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yeah it's pretty unbelievable and I think to understand it you have to go back to her childhood and hear bit about what happened in her early years.

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I had a really chaotic upbringing. My mom wasn't the best mother. She was a prostitute and my dad was a biker. I went through a lot of stuff growing up. A lot of sexual abuse and just being in the system, like I got placed in CFS when I was 11. The first foster home that I went to when I was taken they actually put me in a woman's shelter. There is no homes I would take me because of the small community I came from. So right there then in there I felt like I did something wrong and I felt like I was being punished. My family stopped talking to me and that just became my life. I was always locked up. I always felt alone like I never was able to be a normal teenager.

AMT: So Child and Family Services was involved when she was 11 and she talked about being locked up. When did her interactions with the justice system begin?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: She told me that she was 12 when she was placed in the youth detention detention centre in Winnipeg and that things really only escalated from there.

AMT: Why was she sent there at such a young age?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Well her experience in foster care were not very positive. She says there was abuse and she ran away a lot and you know I guess through that experience she started getting involved in petty crime stuff. She was stealing and committing other property crimes she told me. And when she was placed in the Manitoba Youth Centre she said she acted out a lot. She was cutting herself and she admits her behaviour was disturbing.

AMT: What did they do with her?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Well at fourteen she says the Manitoba Youth Centre and Child Family Services were fed up with her and she was transferred to the women's jail in Manitoba

AMT: Woman's jail. An adult jail at 14?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yes 14 years old and she says she was raised in this women's prison and that the women around her, the other women who were incarcerated, really became like her mothers

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And is because of them why I'm still here today if you know. But it also opened up a lot of opportunities for drug dealing and other criminal other things to come into my life. There I learned a lot. I learned how to do a lot of things at a very young age in jail. So yeah. And I stayed in there until two weeks before my 19th birthday. And I didn't see anybody. I didn't see my family. I didn't see - they didn't even come see me. And when they released me, they just dropped me off at the main mall and good luck with your life.

AMT: Chantelle I'm guessing I know the answer to this. How prepared was she for life on the outside?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yeah she was prepared to survive. I'd say she had no formal education like she didn't finished grade 12 when she was inside. She did not have job skills except for what she learned on the streets or in prison. So when she got out she ended up on the streets selling drugs. She said she was drinking a lot but eventually she turned things around.

AMT: How so? What changed?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: She met a guy settle down. They had three sons together. And Amanda says that really inspired her to be you know a better person. One of the first things she showed me when we met were her sons names tattooed on her arm. And unfortunately the relationship with the boy's father didn't turn out too well, there was violence. And she said that she left him. And after she left him there was an incident where he allegedly came to her home and beat her up with a hammer and Child and Family Services got involved stepped in and took her boys. And so this was heartbreaking for her and things really went downhill when CFS told her that they were going to be keeping her boys.

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From there, it was a couple of days before Christmas and they wouldn't let me see my kids they went in. They said there's one permanent right away. They wouldn't give me a reason why. I had a sober home. I was sober. My kids had food, my kids had clothes, they had a clean home. And from there I just lost hope because I’ve seen what CFS did to me. So I lost all my hope and I didn't have family suppor., I didn't have any resources. And I gave up and I started- I jumped right back into my addiction. Within six months I was in on my federal bid. And when I went to court I tried to tell the judge well what happened and she's like 'oh that's a pity. It's too bad you're getting seven and a half years'. I am like 'Are you serious?' And then I had this guy gets sentenced for the same charges and he got like two years. I am like what's going on here. I understand what I did was wrong but the lengths of my sentence were pretty extreme. I've seen people come in for manslaughter and get less time than I have. So I just don't understand how they pick and choose who they're going to give time to. It doesn't make sense to me.

AMT: Remind me the sentence is for what?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: This is her first federal sentence she's talking about for the armed robbery of a gas station and convenience store in Winnipeg in 2008 and her current sentence is also for an armed robbery.

AMT: Now we know that one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations is to reduce the number of Indigenous people incarcerated in this country. Two years later has progress been made on them?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yet there hasn't been much progress it seems in reducing the number of Indigenous people men or women in prison. But that proportion of indigenous women is especially alarming. You know the most recent annual report from the Office of the Correctional Investigator says the number of Indigenous women in federal prisons has grown 60 percent in the last decade. There is some political movement on this in Ottawa and actually here in B.C. But Senator Kim Pate in Ottawa for example called an inquiry into this issue specifically in December of 2016 and that's still ongoing.

AMT: And Kim Pate of course was working with women in prisons before she became a senator. She's very much up on these issues, huh?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Yes absolutely.

AMT: What would Amanda Lepine like to see change? What did she tell you?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: She has lots of ideas. I think one of the things that really stood out was her advocacy for women. So she definitely talked a lot about the need for more support for women in their communities in the cities and urban rural areas; housing, transition homes especially. She'd like to see more done to keep families together. She'd like to see more facilities like healing lodges for Indigenous women who are incarcerated. And she also would like to see more support for women as they're getting out of prison. Like she when she was a teenager so that they had that opportunity to transition back into the community more smoothly.

AMT: Now and she hasn't seen much of any of those things she'd like to see how does she characterise the path she's been on? What does she say?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: It is may be surprising to hear that she says that she's grateful. She tells me she doesn't feel like a victim you know in spite of all the things that have happened to her. She takes responsibility for the choices that she's made. But she did say there are things that could have helped her when she was just a kid and starting to get caught up in the criminal justice system.

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I just needed somebody to love me and to take care of me and to show me and guide me in a good way. Stability would have been good. I didn't need to be locked up. Like there were signs there from myself like I was cutting all the time I was self-harming and I was acting out and I was freaking out because I just wanted somebody to pay attention to me. And inside there it was easier for them to throw me in segregation. And it sucks because you have all these people thinking that they know what's best for you when they don't when they're actually making your life worse. Like I get it CFS wanted to put me in jail because I kept running away. Yes, but look at the long term damage you guys did to me. I spent 23 years out of 37 locked up and it's not a good feeling. Like I'm grateful for the experiences because it's made me who I am and it's given me the strength and the courage to carry on and tell my story but it's time for me to move on from that

AMT: Wow. When she says stability would have been good I didn't need to be locked up. You met her just as she was going back to jail Chantelle. How does she see herself moving forward?

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Well she's actually I guess in the shortest term she really wants to go back to [unintelligible] on Vancouver Island where that treatment centre that we were coming back from. And she's hoping the parole board will support her in moving into a halfway house in Vancouver this summer. She said she wants to start some post-secondary courses in Indigenous Studies and law. She did finish high school when she was doing her first federal sentence. And of course she wants to be reunited with her boys who are currently being raised by a relative.

AMT: The story of one indigenous woman. But as you say the number of Indigenous women in federal prisons has grown 60 percent in the last decade. It's really important that we hear her story. Thank you.

CHANTELLE BELLRICHARD: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Chantelle Bell reshared she is with CBC's Indigenous Unit in Vancouver. Well Amanda Lepine's life story touches on some of the very issues advocates have been calling attention to for years. Promise Holmes Skinner is a senior manager and Gladue program specialist at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto. She's also an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and she joins me in our studio. Hi.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Hi good morning thanks for having me.

AMT: Well what do you hear in Amanda's story that speaks to the wider issue of Indigenous women in federal prisons today?

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: So it's her circumstances are very unfortunate but unfortunately not at all uncommon. The institutionalisation of a lot of Indigenous women from the very young ages and then using inappropriate spaces for them to go like sending them to a women's facility

AMT: When they're still young age. Yes.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Yes instead of you know intervening in other ways and helping them to develop positive self-worth and that sort of thing. So from the get go we see far too many young Indigenous women and girls going to institutions and then that becomes their life. And they become victims of abuse far too often and then they're running away from these places. So then they're on their own and then they're doing sorts of things that they need to do to be able to survive. So petty crimes, stealing things so that they can eat, so they can buy you know the necessities of life

AMT: So then that just perpetuates the cycle. They never get out of it.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Right exactly. And then if they do end up in custody. They're young impressionable and they don't have a family. So this becomes you know a family that can connect with. And so I mean there's a lot more issues there for sure I'm sure we'll get to some of those.

AMT: Well she said that the women, the adult women, when she was put in with adults became her mothers but that she learned a lot of things in prison that maybe she didn't need to learn.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: I'm sure she learned a lot of things in prison that she would not have learned if she had not gotten to prison.

AMT: So despite calls from many corners to reduce the numbers of Indigenous women in federal prisons the problem has actually become worse. Why is that?

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Well there's a lot of reasons but in general the Justice system we know is discriminatory. It's racist. We at least acknowledge this. The TRC brought a lot of late to this and I would say the current government is aware of this and is trying to do things to address that. So at least we have the recognition that that is a fact. The Supreme Court has been saying that since 1999 with the case of Gladue which many folks are familiar with.

AMT: Remind us Gladue because it's really becomes important. What does Gladue do mean to judges and corrections officers?

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Right. So the Gladue principals say you need to consider the systemic and background factors of an Aboriginal person. It started with sentencing but it goes beyond that to whenever making a decision that affects the liberty of an Aboriginal person and that comes from a section in the criminal code. It's called Section 718 2E and it actually applies to all people. There is a myth that this is only for Aboriginal people. It's not, it's just the case of Gladue was about an Aboriginal woman and before the Supreme Court got it the court below had said this doesn't apply to you because you're not Aboriginal enough for us. But so the section says that sentencing judges need to take into consideration systemic and background factors of all offenders. And in doing that use alternatives to imprisonment whenever possible. So you want to be able to look at the individual as an individual and then when you cannot put them in jail not put them in jail.

AMT: Does it also affect sentencing? If there's a decision made that they are going to jail, does it affect how much time they get or where they go?

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Yes. It should and I would I would say that in many situations now judges are applying it properly. There still is some issues with judges misapplying it, misunderstanding this area of law and lawyers as well. So there needs to be more education in this area 100 percent. But yes the Gladue principles we see them working. We see judges taking these things into consideration and then either not sentencing individuals or instead of- like if the Crown was seeking a penitentiary sentence they might sentence to 18 months or something like that.

AMT: So they get in a provincial jail as opposed to a federal penitentiary.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Yes.

AMT: I'm asking because according to the information from the corrections investigators there are still women, indigenous women, are also disproportionately sentenced to maximum security units and segregation.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Right and one that's a huge issue. It's tragic and it shouldn't be happening. And part of the problem is there's sort of two huge issues before they even get into custody and then there's a bunch of issues once they get there. But two issues are one. One we have community diversion programs that exist but they're not being used everywhere and they're not funded. They're not supported everywhere. We have one here in Toronto, Aboriginal legal services covers that. It's called Community Council. These programs which mean instead of sending the person to custody they go into the community and they deal with their issues with the community and they speak about their underlying issues. They don't throw a band aid on it. They're talking about really what's going on, not the armed robbery, not the alcohol what's below the alcohol. And it's often you know a lifetime of abuse as a result of inter-generational trauma which is you know caused by the government action. So these programs have been proven to work to lower re offending.

AMT: But they're not doing enough. They're not doing enough.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: No. So there are tons of areas of the country where these programs do not exist. So this keeps people out of jail at the first instance and then prevents them from coming back into the system. But jail does not do that. We know that jail teaches people to become more hardened criminals. It removes them from their families. So their new family are other criminals. And as we heard like laughter for example is something that's not even heard within the jails. Laughter, like teaching, is a medicine. So you're deprived of sort of like these fundamentals of life including - I think the term she used was a reminder that there's life behind these walls.

AMT: Right. And also like efforts to get you reintegrated when you come out.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Exactly, precisely..

AMT: Promise Holmes Skinner we have to leave it there because we have someone from Corrections Canada who's waiting to speak to some of this. Thank you for coming in.

PROMISE HOLMES SKINNER: Thanks for having me.

AMT: That is Promise Holmes Skinner a senior manager and Gladue program specialist at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto. Kelley Blanchette has been listening in. She is the deputy commissioner for women at Correctional Service Canada. She is in our Ottawa studio, hello.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Hi good morning thanks for having me.

AMT: I want to just ask you first of all how you react to the story of Amanda Lepine.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Well I'd say her story is not- I would agree it's not atypical. We heard about victimisation and sexual abuse and involvement. You know I think she mentioned a chaotic upbringing involvement with Child and Family Services, self-harm, issues with drug and alcohol abuse. I would say it's a very typical profile

AMT: And then she also talked about children taken away from her when she was in a sober home and how that spiralled back into a situation that got her arrested again.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Right. I couldn't speak to that.

AMT: Do you think there is a problem with the way Corrections Canada is meeting the needs of indigenous women?

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Well as you know Corrections Canada our role comes into play after the offender is sentenced, after the individuals sentenced to federal custody. So we can't control the number of Indigenous offenders that we receive. But there is some work that we can do that ultimately may have an impact on the length of their stay with us or their success in the community when they are released. So there's a number of things that we do to try to have an impact in that way, to reduce the numbers of Indigenous people in our system.

AMT: And I'd like to ask about that because it's been well documented by Canada's corrections investigator that Indigenous women are over-represented when it comes to being labelled high risk and placed in segregation. In fact I think the number is that half of those put in segregation in Canadian prisons are indigenous women. Why is that?

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Could you repeat what you just said, half of those?

AMT: The Native Women's Association of Canada says 50 percent of those put in segregation or solitary confinement in Canadian prisons are indigenous women.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Okay I can't confirm that statistic.

AMT: But you know it's high.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: I do know it's higher. Yes. What we do see is that Indigenous women come in with a different profile than non-indigenous women. So they're more likely to come in with a history of having been incarcerated, more likely to have misconducts while incarcerated, more likely to come in with violent offences. So that does impact their security classification. But I also want to add that our numbers actually for men and women in terms of segregation have reduced substantially over the last few years.

AMT: Where you've been forced to write. I mean it's now considered torture under the United Nations conventions.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Well the decisions that were recently rendered in legal challenges while the courts found that changes are required to administrative segregation, the courts have allowed the government time to examine the decisions and assess the impacts of those. So we're reviewing that and in the process of trying to determine what our next steps will be. But we do recognise the need to integrate you know evolving best practices into correctional policies and especially those pertaining to administrative segregation.

AMT: So are you telling me your hands are tied often by other forces by the time the women get to your prisons.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Well I'm telling you that we can't control who we get. We can only control what we do after we receive them, after they're sentenced.

AMT: I want to play a clip from Claire Carefoot. She's the executive director of the Buffalo Sage Wellness House in Edmonton, a 28 bed minimum security facility, unique because it has an agreement with Corrections Canada and its policies grounded in indigenous culture.

SOUNDCLIP

We believe that you have to heal that hurt and heal that trauma before you can change people's lives or ask people to change their lives. What we want these women to do what we hope for these women is that they come to Buffalo Sage Wellness House they heal that hurt, they go into the depths of that hurt that they've had ever since they were children. They would go into that heal that and then be able to go on with their lives so that they can come out of here, they can get a job, they can get their children back and they can live a decent life for them and their kids.

AMT: The women who are in 'max' do they have access to something like that?

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Absolutely. We have pathways initiative and pre-pathways for those in maximum security. Women in maximum security also have access to elders. We have elders at all of our women's sites. We have indigenous specific programming. In maximum security we have a program called the Women's Modular Intervention. And there are five modules there specific to Indigenous women. So I absolutely agree with Claire. We have a great partnership with Buffalo Sage Wellness and in fact recently expanded it and continue to look for other opportunities for similar partnerships.

AMT: Public safety Canada has actually set aside 10 million dollars over five years to help reintegrate and rehabilitate Indigenous offenders. Are you getting proposals?

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: So in budget 2017 the government of Canada committed 65.2 Million over five years starting in fiscal year 17-18 and then an additional almost 11 million per year thereafter.

AMT: Okay so even more money, but we're almost out of time. Are you getting proposals? Do you see more things happening down the road?

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Yes I do. Yes I do see more things happening down the road and lots going on now. There's lots of planning underway

AMT: Okay Kelley Blanchette we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time today.

KELLEY BLANCHETTE: Thank you.

AMT: Kelley Blanchette deputy commissioner for women at Correctional Service Canada. She joined us from Ottawa. That's our program for today stay with radio 1 for Q. The guest host is Laurie Brown. Today I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Wednesday March 28, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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