Province to build Indigenous healing lodges at jails in The Pas, Brandon

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This article was published 27/09/2022 (1454 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BRANDON — A healing lodge to be created at the Brandon Correctional Centre will seek to help Indigenous inmates connect to culture and spirituality and set them on a traditional path that will prevent them from reoffending, proponents say.

An Indigenous provider of the program said traditional ceremonies were discouraged under colonialism, but now those ceremonies will be used to help Manitoba offenders discover their Indigenous identity and support them in their efforts to rehabilitate.

“For 150 years, they’ve taken away our identity,” Douglas Gerrard said Monday morning, following the province’s announcement. “So now, we’re returning back to the ceremonies, to give back our life.

“And this is a moment here where they’re giving us back our ceremonies without restrictions… That’s the most important, where we gain our healing, our identity to return home.”

During a news conference in Brandon, Justice Minister Kelvin Goertzen announced the province will invest $2.6 million to create two healing lodges — one each for The Pas and Brandon correctional centres.

The province will spend $1.4 million to construct buildings, plus $1.2 million to cover annual staffing and operating costs.

In a government news release, Goertzen stated the lodges will provide cultural connection and support that can be continued when an individual is released from custody, thereby reducing the chance they’ll reoffend.

The lodges will support inmate education, language acquisition, family reunification, sobriety, building a connection to community and a commitment to cultural engagement, noted the news release. They will also incorporate release planning to ensure participants have access to community supports once they leave jail.

“If there are not programs available, supports available within the correctional facility, it’s far less likely that an individual leaving will be successful and far more likely that they might reengage in the behaviour and activity that brought them to the correctional facility to begin with,” Goertzen told those gathered at the Brandon jail for the announcement.

A provincial spokesperson said Headingley Correctional Centre includes a space where elders have performed ceremonies for more than a decade, but the new lodges will offer expanded programming, teaching and ceremonies.

Earlier this year, the province announced a similar healing lodge would be created in Thompson for young offenders.

Gerrard said the Brandon program will include sacred fires, sweat lodges and other ceremonies, and cover such subjects as traditional parenting and anger management. The program will be Indigenous-led, he added, with Indigenous corrections officers recruited to work with inmates.

As of Monday, there were 293 inmates at the Brandon jail, where an official estimated the population to be about 70 per cent Indigenous.

While the healing lodge approach seems new to Manitoba Corrections, it has been part of the federal system for decades.

According to Correctional Service of Canada, it worked with Saskatchewan justice and Indigenous officials to establish a healing lodge in that province in 1997. The Spiritual Lodge at Manitoba’s Stony Mountain Institution was opened in 1999. There are currently 10 healing lodges across the country funded or operated by CSC.

— Brandon Sun