Seven Sparks
He woke up viciously sick, sprawled across a hotel bed in Toronto. He had just scraped himself off Skid Row and found enough money to drink himself into oblivion. AWOL from the army, skinny, hungry and dirty, he fell crying to his hands and knees and prayed for help.
Someone knocked on the door. He opened it.
“You ready to go to the bootleggers?” the stranger asked. The two had apparently made plans.
“I had $28 in my pocket and to an alcoholic, that’s a lot of money. It’ll fix you up,” says the Mi’kmaq elder of that morning in 1976. In keeping with his commitment to humility, he asked not to have his name printed.
To his surprise, he said no to the stranger and instead started a long walk to the detox centre and the even longer walk to sobriety.
“I drank for nine years and I didn’t know I was an alcoholic. That’s the weird part,” the elder says. “I had no idea.”
He was 23 years old then and spent six months in a rehab centre for native people.
“It saved my life,” he says. “I realized, ‘Holy f---, I’m an alcoholic! When I first came out of it, I didn’t know how old I was, I didn’t know if I was married, I didn’t know where I was from.”
While he rediscovered himself, he had to retrain his booze-addled brain to read and write again and to muster the guts to face life without the “false courage” of the bottle.
“You get better physically first, then mentally and the last part is the praying,” he says. “You should work on the praying – that’s what saved me.”
Following the recovery of his sobriety came the recovery of his culture. At the residential day school he had gone to in Lennox Island, PEI, the nuns and priests had taught him to hate his culture. At the same time, his culture taught him to revere elders, and priests and nuns were especially sanctified.
“They would beat you, they’d abuse you and you’d tell your parents, and they wouldn’t believe you,” he recalls.
When he spoke Mi’kmaq, he was hit with straps and sticks and fists. English was the only acceptable tongue and he had to go to church seven days a week. “Growing up, you started to feel like your skin, your language, everything about you wasn’t good.”
When he watched cowboy and Indian movies on TV, he cheered for the cowboys. The “hooting and hollering” Indians scared him. “After I was sober, I thought: That’s f---ed up, but it’s also funny. You’re made to feel you’re the bad guy, but you didn’t do anything.”
When he sobered up, he had another startling revelation: “I looked in the mirror and there was an Indian looking at me and I didn’t know what that was. Everyone knew I was an Indian but me.”
Today, the elder helps other native men and women who have been in prison recover themselves, and their culture, through the Seven Sparks Healing Path Program, run out of the Mi’kmaq Friendship Centre on Gottingen Street in Halifax.
The spiritual roots of the Mi’kmaq offered him a mental and physical purification. As he started going to powwows and sun dances, he felt an inner change. “I felt a pride, but I couldn’t understand it. The dancers had their regalia on, there was singing – it made me feel really good.”
“The sweat lodges are so important,” he adds. “That’s where we get our power and a lot of help. It takes a lot of sweats to see that.”
The elder, whose great-great-great grandfather was the last of the hereditary chiefs in PEI, spent years learning to lead a sweat lodge because his first experience had a such an impact. “I was on my knees and I could see lights,” he remembers. “From then on, I never stopped.”
Scott Lekas is the program director for Seven Sparks, which is funded by the federal Aboriginal Corrections Policy Unit. The program targets aboriginal offenders who leave federal prisons, many of whom grew up on rural reserves and find themselves in a city for the first time.
“A lot of these guys may have started a healing journey on the inside – they may have gotten sober and gotten their head straightened out – and they may have reconnected to native culture,” he says. “Then they get out … and they’re in a completely mainstream environment with no elements of native culture.
“Our idea for Seven Sparks was to be able to provide a whole range of interventions and supports like drug and alcohol counselling, anger management, education resources, training, funding – but we wanted to pitch all that against a backdrop of traditional native practices and values.”
That means the participants, ten men at present, learn about smudging, sweating, fishing and hunting, as well as cooking and making bows and arrows. “That produces a fellowship and a stewardship. That’s an important part of an idea that responsibility isn’t just an onerous thing, but something you should desire and value,” Lekas says.
Seven Sparks has been funded for five years, a rare move, as ACPU tends to commit for one or two years. The program uses a sweat lodge on DND property near Shearwater, but it’s developing a permanent site in Hammonds Plains.
It’s also developing a Dartmouth apartment building to offer housing to the men. A elder who lives in the building provides support as the men restart their lives outside. The program might last weeks for one man, or years for another.
“It’s a support net for people to reconnect with their culture and gain meaningful substance to their healing journey,” Lekas says.
Corey Paul started the program in August (((2009)))) after serving two years in prison for robbery. “I was already participating in native culture – sweats and stuff (in prison) – and that’s where I heard about this program,” he says. “Native spirituality was a route I wanted to keep pursuing when I was released.”
The 25-year-old meets regularly with the elder and sweats often. “I’ve been using them for a place to release, you know? Release a lot of stress and anger. I pray in there, but it’s a spot for me to get stuff out that I can’t really talk about to people.”
Meeting regularly with the elder is a huge boost, too. “I don’t know too many people in this city, because I’m from Indian Brook, so it’s good to have someone to come talk to about your problems,” he says. “Before I went to prison, I was badly addicted to opiates and stuff and my life was pretty messed up. (Now) I’m pretty stable. I’m in a halfway-house, I’ve got a job and am looking for a place to live.”
“One of the things you learn at sweat lodges is humility and the other part is you learn to be mentally strong,” the elder says. “What I tell the guys is when you leave here and you go through hard times, you’ll be able to go through it instead of just going back to the way you were.
“In life, all we know is mental and physical. All the answers we don’t have here, we’ll have when we die. That’s the part that the sweat lodge works on. You’re learning how to focus, you’re learning how to pray, and it makes you strong.”
Leading the intense sweats in the low, womb-like tent, the elder goes limp, listening closely to the breathing. Sweat lodges are hard emotionally and physically and he has to be alert to anyone suffering. The prayers in the darkness are “99 per cent laughter, but sometimes we’re up against hard stuff and you have to be strong,” he says.
“Most of our people are ashamed of who they are. They don’t know they’re Indian,” he says. “Right now, nobody wants to be Indian. It’s not cool to be Indian. What I’m trying to do is bring that back – the songs, the pride, the dignity, the language, the medicines. That’s how deep it’s rooted. The only way we’re going to survive is to get back to the way we were.”
- Halifax Magazine, January 2010