Pubdate: Sat, 25 Nov 2000
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2000 The Toronto Star
Contact:  One Yonge St., Toronto ON, M5E 1E6
Fax: (416) 869-4322
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
Forum: http://www.thestar.com/editorial/disc_board/
Page: A4
Author: Chris Morris, Canadian Press

'WE HAVE TO DO MORE THAN TREAT THE KIDS'

Innu Leaders Urge Community 'Healing' To Solve Addiction

DAVIS INLET - As Innu parents and leaders search for ways to cope with 
children addicted to sniffing gasoline fumes, experts say there's no easy 
solution to the social and cultural deterioration behind the tragedy.

Luke Rich, an Innu who lives in Davis Inlet, wants three of his children 
sent away from this native community to treat their addiction.

"It's too easy to get gas here," says Rich, 35, who has battled his own 
addiction demons for years.

"They have to be taken away to a detoxification centre where they can get 
this stuff out of their systems."

But Rich and others in Labrador know it's useless to send the kids away, 
have them detoxified and then bring them back to the same poverty, despair 
and isolation that drove them to inhale the poisonous vapours.

"We have to do more than treat the kids," Rich says. "We need a long-term 
plan to develop a healthy community. That's our only hope."

Even as 12 children from Sheshatshiu were rounded up this week and taken to 
a makeshift treatment centre at a military base in Goose Bay, Nfld., the 
people of Davis Inlet, 300 kilometres north, were calling for help for 
their addicted children.

That community of 600 says it has at least 60 teenagers who are chronic gas 
sniffers.

Addiction experts who have worked with native youth say there has to be 
community involvement and community healing, if the children are to beat 
their addictions.

"In a lot of cases when they go back home and there are no support 
structures in place to help them, they're at greater risk," says Wayne 
Hammond, a clinical psychologist who helps substance abusers at a centre in 
Calgary.

"They realize the disparity between a nurturing and caring environment and 
the problems of their home environment. Often that increases their sense of 
hopelessness and places them at risk."

Rich knows all about the helplessness and hopelessness that characterize 
Davis Inlet and Sheshatshiu, a larger Innu centre with a population of 
about 1,200.

Rich sniffed gas when he was a kid, before he graduated to alcohol, an 
addiction he has been battling for the past eight years. His alcoholic 
father was often too drunk to bother with food and firewood for the 
impoverished family.

Now three of Rich's five children are solvent-abusers, and he knows why.

"The culture my father should have taught me died with him," he says.

"I don't know how to make snowshoes or do the traditional stuff that my 
father used to do and my grandfather used to do.

"So I'm lost culturally and my kids are lost the same way. We didn't show 
our kids how to live off the land, how to make things. I blame myself for 
it. I should have known."

But Rich wants to turn things around for himself and his children.

Innu parents and leaders are asking the federal and Newfoundland 
governments to help them develop a long-term "healing process" that would 
involve not only sending children away for treatment, but also bringing 
specialists into the communities for family counselling.

There are also calls for more cultural and recreational activities.

Rich warns if there isn't a co-ordinated approach to treatment, it's doomed 
to failure.

He remembers when children were sent away after the 1993 crisis to 
rehabilitation centres in the West. Most returned to Davis Inlet after a 
few months and quickly returned to their habit.

Innu leaders are renewing calls for more control over their own affairs: 
More community treatment centres; more Innu-designed programs, services and 
institutions.
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