Seven Sparks’ program heals with sweat

Complete blackness envelops me. The chanting and heavy
breathing of everyone else rings loudly, like thoughts in my own head.
I retreat under my towel from a blast of cedar smoke and scorchingly
hot steam. This is hopefully the closest sensation to burning alive
that I’ll ever feel.

Finally, I murmur the sacred words and scramble out of the lodge.
I’ve never seen things so clearly or felt a burst of so many
endorphins.

I’ve been invited to a sweat lodge on military property in
Dartmouth, to join aboriginal federal offenders in one of the intense
hour-and-a-half-long sessions that are helping lawbreakers turn their
lives around.

The Aboriginal Corrections Policy Unit in Ottawa has given the Mi’kmaq Native
Friendship Centre a five-year grant for the new program, called the
Seven Sparks Healing Path Program. The program is picking up steam,
with plans to build a permanent healing lodge—the first of its kind
in Atlantic Canada, providing aboriginal offenders with supportive
transitional housing and a place to learn about their culture.

Such services are crucial. While aboriginal Canadians are nine times
more likely to be incarcerated than non-natives, they’re also unlikely
to receive timely access to rehabilitative services, according to a
2006 report by the Office of the Correctional Investigator.

It’s tough to reintegrate into a society that you were never part of
in the first place, but that’s the reality many aboriginal federal
offenders face. After prison, many of Nova Scotia’s aboriginal
offenders make Halifax their home, because they may be ashamed to go
back or are not welcomed back on their reserves, explains Scott Lekas,
Seven Sparks’ program developer. Most of the program’s participants are
young men in their 20s. Some experienced abuse, while others struggle
with addictions and anger management.

The program employs innovative methods, including teaching men to
respect women through serving them.

“They’re going to cook a traditional moose feast for the women,”
explains Lekas. “They’ll stand on the periphery and if anyone needs a
tissue or anything they’re going to serve them.”

The program’s elder, who doesn’t give me his name because of his
wish to embrace complete humility, goes to AA with participants and
encourages participants to learn trades, go back to school and figure
out what they want from life. It’s working for some: One of the
participants speaks excitedly about a carpentry program he’s taking,
getting his GED and his plans to start his own band in Halifax.

The elder also provides participants with continuous moral
support.

“You’re trying to reinstall the pride, the dignity, the songs, the
language and the way that we pray,” he says.

Seven Sparks’ 10 participants get in touch with their roots through
talking circles, bow making, fishing, smudging, traditional feasts and
sweats.

“Going to sweat and letting it all out is like going to a
psychiatrist. You let go of all the pain and issues that you’ve got
going on in your life. You can vent it out and the elders will listen
to you,” explains a 25-year-old who’s serving four years for theft.
“Before I went to prison I was addicted to opiates and cocaine and
stuff. That’s how I was living my life every day, just doing drugs, not
really caring about nothing. That’s how I ended up in prison.”

He grew up on the Indian Brook reservation, where he recalls it was
easy to get pills he from “quack doctors.” “When you go there, you just
gotta say I got a sore back and they’ll write you a script for
Percocets, Oxycontin, whatever, and they don’t really ask you
questions.”

He was never involved in his culture until he went to jail and met
an elder from an inmate group called the Native Brotherhood. Now that
he’s living in a halfway house in Halifax, he says that the Seven
Sparks program provides him with stability.

“That’s a shame that you’ve gotta go to prison to learn your
culture,” he says, laughing sadly.

This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.