. E-mail This Article

North needs healing

Ndilo healing workshops planned

Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 02/01) - Muriel Betsina's voice cracks when she talks about it.

She says she's carried it for 50 years and it's been passed on to her children and grandchildren.

Betsina was sent to the Fort Resolution Mission residential school when she was eight-years-old and stayed until she was 16.

She's one of many in the North who carry the trauma of residential schools every day of their lives.

It has to stop she says.

"The North needs healing," says Muriel Betsina, 57.

Now she's trying to form an association to access funds and begin running residential school workshops in the North.

"I was told if you don't have support from the band you form an association," she says.

"I really want to do something," says Betsina.

In a tearful plea at the Dene Nation assembly last week Betsina asked the leadership to sponsor a group of people who wanted to go to a healing workshop in Edmonton.

The Government of the Northwest Territories Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Akaicho Nation put up some money and five people, including Betsina were able to attend. Tickets for the event cost $250.

The workshop, First International Residential School Conference, ran from Feb 22 to 25. Betsina came back from the workshop, which was attended by 1,600 people, with a renewed desire to kick-start a workshop process in the North.

She said the workshop helped a lot because it gave her a venue to let things out.

"It's the year 2001, we have faxes and e-mails, nothing should be hidden any more," says Betsina.

Betsina is a band councillor for Ndilo and she says it's her people she's speaking for.

"We need healing. That's why so many of us don't know how to be a mother or a grandmother," says Betsina.

Betsina says the association is at the idea phase but she's starting to lay the groundwork to make it a reality.