Great, hopefully everybody can hear us. So
thanks so much, Donna, for the
introductions. Its Sarah and Cindy here. Before we begin, we want to recognize that
we're speaking from the unceded
territories of the Musqueam, the Tsleil-Waututh, and
Squamish peoples today, where we're 
speaking from, and we want to go about
this work with the intention of being
good guests here in these coastal
territories, and we also want to recognize
the various territories from which
you're all joining us today. This is
Cindy. We're really delighted and honored
to be talking about approaches to
reframe family violence with everyone
who's joining us for the webinar today.
We look forward to hearing from Leanne
Simpson, whose words will provide the
main substance of the webinar, as well as
to hearing from those of you who've
joined us as participants. As the
overview says, Sarah and I are going to
start the webinar with an introduction
to our approach to this topic of family
violence in indigenous communities. This
work will touch on some of the work that
we've been doing for a paper for the
National Collaborating Centre on
Aboriginal Health. Leanne will then
center Anishinaabe stories and her
thoughts on family violence within the
teachings and Anishinaabe practices of
kinship. These teachings will provide a
foundation for rethinking family
violence within a decolonial lens and
foster a reimagining of these issues
with Indigenous voices and experiences
at the center. Sarah and I will then
close the webinar with some discussion
questions and ideas for future reading.
Before we get into the material, we just
each want to take a moment to introduce
ourselves. Gala Kusla. I'm Sarah Hunt. I'm
researcher and writer of Kwagiulth
ancestry from the Kwakwaka'wakw people from
Tsaxis, which is what's known as Fort Rupert today, and I'm also English and Ukrainian
heritage on my mum's side, and grew up in
Hul'qumi'num territories or what's known as
Victoria, BC. I'm an Assistant Professor
in First Nations and Indigenous Studies
as well as the Department of Geography
at UBC, and currently also hold a postdoc
with the National Collaborating Centre
as well. And my approach to these issues
of violence emerges from my years of
working at the community level with
youth and families, primarily around BC,
both within government created policies
and programs,
as well as fostering community
responses that are rooted in Indigenous
cultural teachings and practices. And I'm
really delighted to be part of the
conversation today, so thanks everyone
for joining. Hi there, I'm Cindy Holmes and
I'm a white queer settler of Scottish,
Irish and English heritage who grew up
on the traditional territory of the
Attawandaron people in what's known now as Guelph, Ontario. I am now a visitor on the
unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people in the city
known as Vancouver. I'm a researcher and
an educator. I have a particular interest in
connections between violence, gender,
sexuality, colonialism and health, and
this grows out of over 20 years of
community-based work that I've done in
anti-violence, health and social justice
movements. And most of my work has
focused on violence in the lives of
women, Indigenous people and lesbian, gay,
bisexual, queer, transgender & two-spirit
people. I'm currently a postdoctoral
fellow with the National Collaborating
Centre for Aboriginal Health and I'm
also a Michael Smith Foundation for
Health Research postdoctoral fellow at
Simon Fraser University where I'm
coordinating a participatory action
research project with two-spirit, trans
and gender non-conforming people about
safety, belonging and well-being. And I'm
very pleased today to be joining Sarah and
Leanne in this conversation. We want to
begin by talking about the importance of
family and kinship to Indigenous peoples
and communities. Family and kinship
structures have always been at the heart
of Indigenous communities' wellness and
ability to function as self determining
peoples. Of course, the way that knowledge
is passed on within families, and the way
that kinship itself is understood, is
culturally specific and unique to each
Indigenous people, but generally speaking
we know that historically and in some
communities and to different extents
today, extended family lineages form the
core of Indigenous people's identities
expressed across the generations in
culturally specific ways. For indigenous
peoples, family relationships are enacted
within a network of reciprocal
responsibilities between Indigenous
peoples and their non-human or animal
kin, the land and waters, and the
supernatural, spiritual or ancestral
realms that comprise their territories. And of course,
we know that key strategy of colonialism
was to attack these family structures, so
this occurred through the imposition of
patriarchal nuclear family models in the
Indian Act, through the residential
school system and through the imposition
of an inequitable gender roles rooted in
the patriarchal binary. So we can see a
cultural gap between how Indigenous
concepts of family differ greatly from
the nuclear family models that have been
imposed through colonization. As we see
in this quote from Professor Jessica
Ball, who is at UVIC's School of Child and
Youth Care, euro-Western models of the
nuclear family, in which one father
figure along with a mother figure, is
intended to meet all of the child's
needs for guidance, discipline, affect and
support have never characterized
traditional Indigenous communities. So
when we talk about Indigenous concepts
of family, it's important to recognize
that Indigenous cultures were and are
dependent on the healthy functional
relationships that operated within
extended family structures, and that
Indigenous peoples have always had ways
of ensuring the maintenance of strong
kinship networks as part of their
survival and self-determination.
Indigenous knowledge systems around the
world embrace a holistic and
interconnected understanding of health
and well-being, which is in stark
contrast to Western eurocentric and
colonial constructs of health which
imagine body, mind and spirit as
disconnected from one another and from
other social, cultural, spiritual and
environmental factors. And the social
determinants of health are usually
understood to be the social and economic
conditions that influence the health of
individuals and communities, and violence
and colonialism are recognized as social
determinants of health; however, in much
of that literature, in the social
determinants of health literature, we see
that colonialism is frequently not seen
as an overarching determinant of health
in Indigenous peoples' lives, but rather
as an add-on to other social
determinants. Many Indigenous people have
emphasized the importance of moving
beyond the social in understanding the
determinants of health, including Margo
Greenwood, the Director of the National
Collaborating Centre, Sarah de Leeuw, Nicole Marie Lindsey, and Charlotte Reading.
In their recent book, Determinants of
Indigenous Peoples Health in Canada:
Beyond the Social, the authors emphasized
that an approach that goes beyond the
social recognizes first that colonialism
is the most fundamental determinant of
health for Indigenous people in white
settler colonial states and is an active
and ongoing force influencing the
well-being of Indigenous peoples in
Canada. Secondly that Indigenous
knowledges and ways of life must be
the primary frame of reference for
understanding Indigenous health. Third,
that Indigenous voices and authors must
be centered, and finally, that moving
beyond what is typically understood as
the social may include an understanding
of geographic, including land, economic,
historical, spiritual, narrative,
genealogical, language, structural
determinants of health, as well as gender,
culture, age, etc. So moving to a
discussion of the legacy of work to
address violence within in Indigenous families, homes and intimate relationships, we
begin by recognizing that as long as
there has been violence, there has been
resistance. Beyond diverse programs,
research books or other formalized
anti-violence efforts that show up in
the literature, it's important to
recognize that much of the resistance to
violence has taken place out of view,
precisely because it's taking place in
our homes, families and intimate
relationships. So rather than just
focusing on histories of violence, we
also seek to hold off the everyday
resistances of our relations who have
been working to create change. We found
that a discourse about what has come to
be termed family violence in Indigenous
communities first emerged in Canada in
the mid to late 1980s. Most of these
early efforts were led by Indigenous
groups, primarily with women taking the
lead. Discussions of family violence
emerged alongside broad efforts to name
various forms of violence as violence, to
name sexual, physical, emotional and other
forms of abuse, along with the systemic
and historical factors which were at the
root of that violence. Many initiatives
to name family violence came from
survivors who were themselves living the
daily impacts of abuse,
and many of these survivors sought to
break the cycles of intergenerational
violence in their own homes by being an
agent of change. So naming the violence,
just that act of naming, was for many a
first step. Naming the legacy of
residential schools was also key to
understanding patterns of abuse, both
because of the physical and sexual
violence students endured, and also
because, as we talked about before, of the
family disconnection that the systems
created. And it's important to remember
that this time that the discourse first
emerged in the 80s, residential schools
were still operational, as the last
school here in BC closed in the 80s,
and the last one in Canada closed in
1996. So part of grappling with the
legacy of residential schools was and is
understanding that survivors brought
new patterns into their own homes and
families. At the community level, efforts
to name and address violence within
families has been connected to broader
efforts to end the various forms of
violence experienced by Indigenous women
and girls especially. We also see that
the anti-violence organizing of gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender and
two-spirit Indigenous people as vitally
important, yet it often receives less
recognition within this field. So two-
spirit people have been deeply impacted
by their marginalization or erasure in
the Indian Act, as well as by homophobic,
transphobic and sexist violence, and that
includes violence at the hands of their
own family members, something we
understand as being under the rubric
then of family violence. The late
Patricia Montour Angus is one of many
Indigenous women who have called for
expansive definitions of violence that
reflect the complexities of colonial
power relations and the intersecting and
interrelated forms of violences
experienced by Indigenous peoples.
Speaking from her experiences as a
Mohawk woman, she identified racism,
colonialism and state violence as
inseparable from other experiences of
violence in the lives of Indigenous
women. She explained that "violence
is not just a mere incident in the
lights of Aboriginal women, violence does
not just span a given number of years. It
is our lives and it is in our histories."
She goes on to emphasize that organizing
against a single form of violence, men's,
is not a luxury that I have experienced.
The general definition of violence
against women is too narrow to capture
all of the experiences of violence that
Aboriginal women face. Here we can see
the need to not only understand the
continuum of violence experienced under
colonialism, but to develop definitions
of violence which account for more than
just individual acts of gendered
violence. Patricia Montour Angus was
speaking out about a problematic and
narrow definitions of violence that she
saw in white feminist anti-violence
organizing. Organizing against violence
against women and within families grew
out of grassroots feminist activism in
the 1960s and 70s when women established rape crisis centers, shelters and
transition houses, and then government
funding programs and legal reform
efforts followed in the 80s and 90s. The
discourse on violence against women and
family violence in these services and
programs tends to represent the violence
in certain ways and with certain
underlying assumptions, that families are
heterosexual and nuclear, to people, male
female, who may be co-parents of
children, and that the violence is male
violence against women. And in that,
gender not race, class, sexual
orientation or other factors, are seen as...
gender is seen as the nucleus of power
dynamics. In this framework, the methods
of addressing violence against women are
offering services for survivors, advocacy,
trauma counseling, criminal justice
system supports, providing transitional
housing and related services for women
leaving abusive partners, improved
responses from the justice system
including protecting witnesses,
protecting children and offering or
mandating counseling for male offenders.
Indigenous women, along with feminists of
color, low-income women, poor women and
lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer and
two-spirit people have argued that the
established anti-violence frameworks
that have dominated the feminist
anti-violence movement have focused too
narrowly
on gender-based interpersonal violence
in the private sphere of the
heterosexual home and I've lacked an
analysis of the interlocking nature of
gender, race, sexuality, class, and
disability, thereby ignoring multiple
forms and contexts of violence. So we
want to simply highlight this context
for understanding how certain ideas and
responses have become normative in how
we understand the issue. I'm, we're,
currently in the process of conducting a
review of the Indigenous family violence,
intimate partner violence or
relationship violence literature from
2002-2015. There's a great deal of
important work that's been done over
these 15 years, including making visible
some of the innovative community work
that's been going on, but we also began
to recognize some troubling trends in
how the discourse of family violence has
been working to reproduce some ideas
about Indigenous people, our families and
communities that emerged out of colonial
relationships. So that is we've been
identifying ways in which the
framings of family violence often fail
to reflect Indigenous peoples lived
understandings of both family and of
violence that we talked about earlier. So
I just want to touch on a few of these
trends today. The first trend is that
colonialism is being acknowledged as a
problem of the past. While some of the
literature talks about residential
schools or other colonial impositions
within Indigenous family systems, it's
often framed as though colonialism is
over, and this is counter to how we
understand colonization as a key factor
in Indigenous peoples' health today,
especially as we live and work here on
unceded territories.
We also see that the main factor is
being named, at the root of family
violence, are drug and alcohol use and
poverty, but rather than looking at how
poverty and substance use are fostered
through legacies of trauma, inequitable
systems, racist education, which leads to
less job opportunities, and so on, the
analysis often serves to naturalize
these qualities as being somehow a
native problem. Effectively these
patterns are not examined alongside
systemic harms, but instead used to label
Native people as inherently addictive,
criminalized or poor. And this then leads
to the next troubling trend we've been
seeing, which is that discourses of
family violence often portray Indigenous
peoples through a lens of pathology or
criminality. Patterns of violence are
portrayed as being somehow inherent to
Indigenous peoples, as one of many types
of crime running rampant in our
communities. And finally we found that
none of the sources we surveyed over
these 15 years contained any reference to
gay, lesbian, bisexual and two-spirit
people. So two-spirit people are being
further erased from discussions about
our families, our kinship networks and
intimate relationships. We did, however,
find limited discussion of Indigenous
experience in some of the literature on
gay, lesbian, bisexual, intimate partner
violence.
So just following from what Sarah's
talked about there, we see a number of
underlying assumptions in these
frameworks. Violence is predominantly
defined at the interpersonal level with
a focus on physical, emotional, sexual
violence between two people. The majority
of the sources that we've looked at
mirror mainstream domestic violence
discourse in portraying men as offenders
and women as victims of abuse. Some
literature states that while anyone can
be a victim or perpetrator, with the
exception of young children, some
Indigenous family violence intervention
programs have emphasized that they have
focused their definition on men
perpetrating violence against women and
children because it is the most
prevalent form of abuse. Similarly, some
research has emphasized the fundamental
importance of ensuring that all
solutions should prioritize the safety
of women and children who have been
abused. While much of the literature
names contexts of shame, fear, silence and
also what might be called hiding family
violence, most of this doesn't really
address the context of ongoing
racialized state interventions and the
pervasive racist and sexist stereotypes
about Indigenous people that actually
work to produce this silence and shame.
Similarly, we've noted that some
literature draws on a psychology
discourse that works to pathologize
Indigenous communities through the
naturalization of the violence, as Sarah
discussed earlier. For example, describing
the violence as "a trait" or 
"characteristic" of Indigenous communities
rather than something that's being
actively produced through ongoing
systemic colonial state violence. In some
cases, systemic and structural factors
are named in the literature as factors,
but are not themselves defined as forms
of violence, so the continuum of violence
that Indigenous people experience in
their lifetime and in their family's
history is not well reflected, such as
land theft, residential schools, child
welfare, foster care, racist police
violence, etc. A crime control discourse
pervades much of the literature, and
here we see family violence defined as a
crime perpetrated by individual
Indigenous people. As well, the Canadian
criminal justice system is centred in
much of the literature as the framework
through which to understand and respond
to the violence. In this, individual
assaults and patterns of individual
behavior become the focus, and intimate
relationships then are really privatized
and positioned as outside of the wider
social and spatial contexts. So we're
really interested in highlighting what
is rendered invisible or pushed out of
view when these frameworks are being
centered. So recognizing that settler
colonialism is ongoing, that it is not
something of the past, that state
policies and practices aimed at
addressing family breakdown are
themselves forms of violence; for example,
residential schools, the 60 scoop of
Indigenous children from their families,
child welfare practices today that
remove Indigenous children from their
families and communities, that these are
forms of violence. Indigenous families do
not necessarily adhere to nuclear family
models. That the justice system is
another conduit of racist violence that
criminalizes victims, disproportionately
convicting and incarcerating Indigenous
people, which all contributes to a
continuing cycle of violence. Also, we
miss seeing that rural and reserve
communities have very minimal programs
and services. And then, gendered violence
goes beyond heterosexual relationships.
As we've mentioned already, two-spirit
and trans people face family violence in
the form of homophobia and transphobia
and abuse within the home, as well as
intimate relationship violence. And many
of the programs and services that are
developed do not account for Indigenous
LGBTQ and two-spirit people at all. I just
want to mention that the poster on this
slide is from the Native Youth Sexual
Health Network, from their Native youth
photography project, and they encourage
people to download these posters and use
them and share them in your communities.
So within the increasing and constantly
growing and evolving discussions around
violence in Indigenous communities,
there's a push to challenge these
narratives.
There is a sense, certainly within many
communities we've worked with and in our
own work, to foster the resurgence of
Indigenous cultural and legal practices,
as well as to foster healthy gender and
sexual relations, but the dominant
family violence frameworks don't fit. The
bottom line is that the violence hasn't
stopped, that violence of all kinds
continues to be a daily reality for
Indigenous people, including among
intimate partners and in our extended
family networks. In a 2010 special issue
of Pimatisiwin, which I
mispronouncing, sorry about that, A
Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous
Community Health focused on domestic and
lateral violence, Dr. Nancy Gibson writes
that despite the fact that a discourse
around Aboriginal family violence has
existed for 30 years in Canada, the words
and concepts around violence in the
family are still unspoken in many
Aboriginal communities and also in the
literature. So clearly, many of the
solutions aren't getting out, the kinds
of change we want to see. As Cindy Baskin
noted in her 2006 book chapter in Systemic
Oppression, Violence and Healing in
Aboriginal Families and Communities,
Indigenous scholars, communities and
practitioners have identified the
importance of developing understandings
and responses to violence which connect
with current struggles for
self-determination on personal and
community scales, and this means that
centering Indigenous peoples' voices,
agency and self-determination, and anti-
violence efforts are key in order to
avoid reproducing colonial power
relations. Further, stopping the violence
means stopping all forms of violence, a
continuum of violence, including those
perpetrated by state actors and systems.
Anti-violence efforts are further
complicated by the constant need to push
back against portrayals of family
violence in the media, and in some
research by various government
departments and scholars, that violence
is somehow inate to indigeneity, as we've
been talking about. For example, we've
seen this in some of the recent coverage
of missing and murdered girls and women,
as the source of the violence is located
within their own families. And, of course,
we're not denying that there are
offenders within Indigenous communities,
certainly not, but only that there are
plenty of other factors that we've been
talking about that cannot be ignored.
Further, there are widespread calls to
address people in relationships that
we've been saying don't fall within
heterosexual nuclear families, and this
includes looking at violence in extended
family networks, including the ways that
patriarchal forms of power are wielded
by some leaders, through violence in
traditional kinship systems, and bringing
visibility to the violence two-spirit
face in their homes, including homophobic
and transphobic violence and intimate
partner abuse, as we've been discussing.
In reframing the issue within expanded
definitions of family and culturally
specific terms and expanded definitions
of violence to account for colonial
relations, the continuum of approaches
have been taken up. Anti-violence
measures within broader resurgents, movements. At the heart of these efforts is
understanding that Indigenous resurgence
is simply not possible without
addressing violence, which continues to
break down our kinship obligations. Some
approaches have sought to indigenize
mainstream anti-violence programs,
policies and models, such as through
developing culturally safe programming
and the integration of cultural
teachings into existing programs, but
other approaches have created
alternative models at the community level
which get at the root of cycles of
violence by fostering a revitalization
of Indigenous peoples' individual and
collective agency, reciprocal
responsibility and accountability. Some
of this work gets overlooked as being
about family violence, per se, but we see
this being vitally important to ending
cycles of abuse, and this includes some
of the examples you see there on the
screen: revitalizing coming-of-age
ceremonies, restoring kinship networks,
revitalizing conflict resolution within
our own legal traditions, embracing gender
roles not rooted in the patriarchal
model, and land based programming. Taken
together, these approaches seek to
revitalize Indigenous ways of being and
relating to one another, in which
violence is unimaginable. Not content
with simply having less incidents of
violence, these approaches instead seek
to think far beyond state based
solutions to see Indigenous cultural
practices as key to fostering health and
safety in our homes and families.
Indigenous cultural teachings and
practices, then, are rooted in laws that
are vital for violence prevention, and
these include teachings about healthy
relationships based on reciprocity, respect,
consent and sovereignty. Each Indigenous
community then has culturally specific
repercussions for violating these
teachings, so restoring the capacity to
enact these repercussions, to effectively
seek accountability in our own practices,
is key. Within this approach, Indigenous
peoples' agency is recognized as
essential. So instead of it looking
externally for health, approaches entail
looking internally to our own systems of
accountability, and again each Indigenous
community has its own stories that
contain teachings about how to live well
with one another. So there is no one
solution or one cookie cutter approach
that will work for everybody, but each
Indigenous community or culture has its
own paradigm for fostering the health of
its kinship relations. And on a slide
here, I've included a photo of two woven
chilkat pouches that my aunties
made me. For me, they symbolize the ways
our kinship practices weave us into
relations, which extend back for
generations, and bring our ancestral
knowledge about our relationships into
the present day. And so with that, within
this context, in this framework, were very
pleased now to introduce Leanne
Simpson whose work has been really
central in this reimagining of family
relations.
you
