Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Deline (Nov 15/99) - Charlie Neyelle leads the Sunday service in Deline. He also holds spiritual healing workshops throughout the North. He's come a long way from the angry young man he was when he left residential school.

He is a friendly, soft-spoken man, who has gained the respect of his congregation and the people of the North.

Raised by his parents in Deline, Neyelle was sent to residential school in Aklavik for a few years and then on to Grollier Hall in Inuvik.

"In school, I had a very hard time," Neyelle said. "I was very deaf and it was very hard for me to learn anything, so my dad pulled me out of school when I was 16."

"I grew to hate the Grey Nuns and I remember thinking, 'I'm not going to let anybody do that to me again if I grow up," he recalled.

His education came from the land in the form of traditional lessons he learned from his father who had learned them from his father.

"My dad became the best teacher I ever had. He was loud and I still hear him," he smiled.

"He taught me philosophy and the Dene way; reading and writing; how to hunt moose and where they go on the land."

Neyelle says his mental, physical and spiritual growth came from a variety of teachings.

"I've taken a little bit from here and there -- some things from the white man's culture and some things from the Dene culture," he explained.

Living in two worlds, he began to realize what was good in each and sifted through to glean what he could from each culture.

"I was collecting these problems and carrying them around for many years," he said. "When I was 44, I realized that there must be a way to get these things out and begin to heal."

"I asked myself, 'Why am I like this?'" he continued. "Slowly, I began to learn things."

"I realized that the world works from the outside in," Neyelle said. "Anger, depression, disappointment, alcoholism and gossip are all built up inside and I started to work these problems from the inside out."

"I took it and I placed it here," he said, patting the table. "I put it all on paper and started to do workshops to teach people to love themselves."

Through this intimate understanding of the individual mind, body and spirit, healing is achieved that transcends the individual and spills out into the community, he said.

Left unchecked, the negative emotions will infect the individual who inevitably externalize their bad feelings.

"Anger, depression, disappointment, alcoholism -- everybody collects that and they use it against each other," he said. "You have to gain the knowledge within yourself; what is love and what is anger?"

"The only way to get rid of it is dealing with one issue at a time, one day at a time. If you can do that, you can heal anything."

"I now accept the Grey nuns and the priests and the only person who is going to do that for you is yourself," he said.