On the shores of a still-frozen lake in front of a traditional Inuit home with a spring sun melting the snow underfoot, the governor-general met eight women who reconnect with their Inuit roots as they try to recover from addiction.
Mary Simon wiped away tears as she heard what her visit to the participants and leaders of the Isuarsivik Reconstruction Center in Kujujac meant on Monday.
“We need to acknowledge our history, our traumas. But we also need to put a lot of emphasis on our strength,” said Mary Aichison, deputy chairman of Isuarsivik’s board of directors.
“You did this, you show us this, you model this, you model so much of who we are, what we strive to be.”
Simon hugs Sarah May and Laura May (left) while husband Whit Fraser watches during a visit to the Isuarsivik Recovery Center. (Adrian Wilde / Canadian Press)
Isuarsivik was founded in 1994 as a public organization focused on addiction treatment. But in the early 2000s, after funding problems and a lack of success in the results of the program, it closed for several years.
“We started looking at our program and realized we were using the Minnesota model, which is great, the 12 steps,” said board president David Forest.
“But we don’t have to focus on the essence, we have to focus on the soul, the trauma.”
He said that during the re-creation of the program, Simon had told him that programs developed by well-meaning people from the south did not meet the needs of the Inuit.
She said, “It’s time to create our own program.”
“For Inuit from Inuit”
This led to the creation of the first Inuit-specific trauma program, “designed for Inuit by Inuit”, which builds awareness of intergenerational trauma as a major cause of addiction.
Isuarsivik conducts nine-week programs using a tailor-made approach to harm reduction.
“It’s so important to say those words, ‘I need help,'” Simon said.
“From experience, if you can’t love yourself or if you don’t love yourself as a person and what you are, then you can’t give love to others.”
Many of those who shared lunch with the governor-general on Monday have had their own experience asking for help, including George Cauki.
George Cauki started working at Isuarsivik nearly seven years ago when he was sober for five years and is now the program’s land coordinator. (Olivier Plante / Radio Canada)
“There is so much that sobriety has changed in my life,” he said.
Kauki started working at Isuarsivik nearly seven years ago when he was sober for five years and is now the program’s land coordinator. He said it was helpful to be in an environment where people encouraged his sobriety.
“Earth is my therapy. We don’t have many counselors, where we are from the north, not like the south, where you can go to schedule a meeting with a counselor,” he said.
“When I need therapy, I just run to the ground, take off and do my thing, and that helps me live another day, I guess.
“Earth is my therapy,” says Cauki, shown here on earth with his canine team. (Submitted by George Cauki)
This is something he is working to share with others now in his role, guiding others on their journey of sobriety, helping them to fish, hunt and reconnect with the land.
Isuarsivik recognizes the role of colonialism and the deprivation of Inuit culture in the trauma that many people live in Nunavik today.
It also works for expansion. A new center is under construction, which will allow inpatient programs to expand from nine to 32 and allow entire families to participate in treatment so that partners and children can support their loved ones.
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