Poundmaker's Lodge: A Healing Place

In just 29 minutes, Alanis Obomsawin manages to address with sensitivity, frankness, and intelligence the vast issue of the relationship between alcohol and Indigenous communities. Giving voice to the residents of the Poundmaker Lodge detoxification program, she reveals the extent of the suffering they seek to escape by becoming intoxicated. Each of the stories revealed would require its own film, as the realities are so complex; colonialism, acculturation, the cycle of repeated violence, rejection, abuse... While residential schools were still rampant (the film dates from 1987 and the last Canadian residential school closed its doors in 1996), the individuals we see on the screen are surprisingly lucid about the causes of their distress. The disastrous consequences of colonialism are palpable; how can one live when one has been torn away from one's family, forced to forget one's language, and convinced that one is a being to be civilized? How can we think that the wounds of so much violence will be healed in a few generations?

However, at the Poundmaker Lodge, an alternative and more suitable shelter and care facility is being set up, at last. Here, we speak and are listened to. We discover and find that which is absolutely fundamental to every human being: love. This thing that is so obvious and free, this thing that radiates and grows as soon as we use it, this food for the heart that allows survival and growth, has been ransacked by colonialism. Parents reject their children who remind them too much of their oppressors, the whites. Children survive their parents' suicides, discover their fathers dead, their mothers murdered, and their brothers and sisters bruised. Children are used as cattle on white farms, in their "foster homes”. The world sometimes gets so ugly that people die, that they hang themselves from a tree one afternoon.

The Poundmaker Lodge existed in 1987. It still exists. How come such places are not the norm? How is it that Indigenous people are grossly over-represented in Canada's prisons when the wounds of acculturation are still raw and unmarked children's graves are still being found? While violence against Indigenous communities persists, while the weight of the past continues to haunt young people in training, who are trying to define their identity, why is an implementation of ancestral practices in the treatment of psychological distress not more frequent? As much as this film is reassuring because it offers a real perspective of healing, it is also devastating because it forces us to come to terms how just how little has changed, 40 years later.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault

Tënk's Artistic Director