Peaceful Sit-In at Chuck Strahl’s office: We will sit here until Chuck Strahl pledges to renew funding to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation

3 Comments

1. altax
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   Very nice pictures.. LOL

2. Gregory Brass
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   This is likely to be an unpopular view. But I will say it anyways.

   First of all, I am supportive of the AHF or some other funding delivery body getting more and dependable program funding to help enable therapeutic services; there is no question in my mind it is desperately needed. Though, I say this with a caution.

   I recall in the early days of the AHF hearing about funding $500,000 three-day conferences about residential schools. As I recall there were many of them. By happenstance, I came across one once but I never attended nor even heard about it till long after registration had closed. Then most recently I met up with an older relative and several other people from the same community who had been flown to another such gathering in the city where I live. They live three provinces away.

   It was nice. We went for dinner and explored the city together. But it was a residential schools conference. The hotel where he and other registrants were staying at was a high end hotel and presumably expensive. So this point confuses me: how does flying people in need of healing from residential school to a three day conference in a major Canadian city, paying probably $500-600 for a plane ticket and up to $200-300 a night for a hotel room, plus per diems, have anything remotely to do with healing?

   I can see spending that money on actual healers and therapists, organizing local group get togethers, running short workshops, etc. My personal viewpoint, albeit based on a limited foray into AHF expenditures on what conference gatherings I have been alerted to and witnessed, suggests there is something worth questioning about how some of the previous AHF money was spent.

   As for healing, I have attend many ceremonies in my short life. No one pays me to go and no one tells me to go - I just go. I have seen healing take place, or witnessed the start of it, and I have felt healing take place in me. I have watched men and women grovelling in the dirt in agony and tears at these ceremonies. To the best of my knowledge no AHF money paid for that - we, those attending the ceremony, made it so.

   That’s all I have to say.

3. admin
   Posted %A %B %e%q, %Y at %I:%M %p | Permalink

   Definitely some good points but still no excuse to cut off 134 community projects who do amazing work. Also: seems more worth spending time critiquing government spending which is way less accountable than any structure I have seen.