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Interview with Robert Kiyoshk
Change of Seasons Program
Part One

Robert Kiyoshk first coordinated the Squamish Nation Men's Domestic Violence Counsellor Training Program, known as the Change of Seasons Program, in 1992, and continues to manage the men's spousal assault program. He currently delivers workshops and training to First Nations communities and service providers. This interview was conducted at the Squamish Nation Reserve in June 1996 by BCIFV Newsletter Editor, Barbara Sherman.

Q: In your paper included in the 1994 Stopping the Violence Conference proceedings, you discuss community work in First Nations localities. Explain why you used the word localities instead of communities.

A: That term (locality) was used because I believe community implies exactly that; the sense of togetherness, of cohesiveness, and all too often it has been my experience that Native communities are not cohesive. They are fragmented to a large extent. There is a lot of factionalism on the reserves and in the native communities, and so I used the term locality. Out there a video or a representation in the media of one community that is doing well somehow creates the impression that 99% of the communities are doing well, when that is not the case at all. Of the six hundred and some reserves in Canada, maybe twenty of those, if that, are doing well. The rest remain out of sight. I think community is a really misleading term, because the sense of community is not always present.

For a community to work in a co-ordinated fashion people have to have a common vision and perspective, and there has to be a real willingness to work along those lines. I sense that factionalism often stands in the way. There are elements on the reserve or in the community that are totally against the legal system. There are factions that are totally against the imposed form of government that is utilized on reserves and see it as merely a tool for mainstream society to maintain control of native communities. I see young people who are very dissatisfied with some of the activities of the band councils and the so-called elders in their communities.

I believe that in native communities there are the same kind of strata as in mainstream societies. Getting an education and becoming proficient in an area is desirable, but what happens is the same strata as in the mainstream society are being replicated in native communities. Today there is a native elite on a national level that would be represented by the people who get on the Aboriginal Achievement Awards, who are political. The political elite are the same in native communities as they are in the mainstream.

A lot of the native students going to university now are leaning in the direction of law or something they see as quite distinguished in mainstream society; something they see as possibly their salvation, something that will pull them out of the dark. Often the motivation for doing so is not out of the sense of improving their community, but out of self-aggrandizement. Often we can lose focus of the need to improve the situations generally for our people and get on to that tangent of doing things for recognition.

Q: Please discuss some of the barriers that may be encountered when trying to apply a coordinated response to social problems in these localities.

A: I think there will always be a major gap between the legal system and our communities because of historical events, and because of current events where native men and women are well over-represented in prison. On the other hand, there are some valiant efforts on behalf of native people to correct those wrongs too. But in my experience, I see that there is a tendency to gloss over situations with a few success stories when there are a lot more non-success stories.

In the work I do in spousal abuse and other forms of family violence there have been some really admirable efforts at co-operation from mainstream academics and people that work in this area. It is very important that this type of co-operation continue to happen. People who have not lived in the native community and who are coming from a helping perspective, I think sometimes these well-intentioned people have a really hard time understanding what is happening in native communities. I think there is always the pattern of accepting what you see going on from your own experience; and often that's what happens. So people come in giving advice based on what their experience has been, when in reality those experiences are so drastically different than the experiences of the native men and women and those counsellors who have grown up in those communities.

I think some attempts that have been made to be sensitive to cross-cultural issues are well-intentioned as well, but I believe that even the native people who sometimes provide these cross-cultural co-operative efforts, training and information sharing, have themselves been educated away from their communities. They have gone to an academic or urban setting and picked up approaches that are used there (and maybe some of them work there) and they try to fit those into native communities, and they don't always fit.

I believe that funding is always a big issue for native people in both urban and rural settings; that the way the funding is distributed and what's available often causes a lot of competition, a lot of conflict within the native communities themselves. It is almost like throwing a piece of meat out to some sharks or pirhanas; they are all scrambling for it, they will do anything to get it, and often that process is most disruptive to the native community. Unfortunately, that has become the way that funding is made available.

I see, as a possible alternative, a couple of things that could be put in place. I think that native communities can be encouraged and assisted in developing their own economic base so they are not always there with their hands out. They can be encouraged to try out imaginative or different types of fund-raising, to start doing something for themselves rather than to always be there with their hand out at funding time, and then be disappointed when the contract does not come through. I often will talk to a community that says, "Robert, we would like you to come in and do something, however we are going to wait to see what the funder says." And then I get a call just a month or so after the proposal to say sorry, we can't do this because the funding didn't come through. I often wonder if that is their only alternative, can't they see beyond that? I think that goes back to the type of government that exists in native communities, the generations of being socialized to accept second best, being socialized to believe that being responsible for yourself is not your responsibility. That is an unfortunate and sad statement, but I think that is really the case in so many places, and I believe now that in confronting these kinds of situations, the whole system on reserves has to be looked at.

The entire social, economic and political system has to be looked at. For me or anyone to go in and do three or four days or one or two weeks addressing spousal abuse will not deal with the situation. All of the components of that system have to be smoothly functioning and have to be up to par and doing well in order for social problems to be addressed. I think, too, that the so-called leadership of these communities have to be brought on board. Too often when I have been in native communities the actual social workers and politicians do not become involved themselves. They don't go to take in a community forum on domestic violence because they see it as a real stigma. It's something for only those people who are walking around with black eyes and who have the cops pulling up to their doors, it's not something that we can all confront.

One of the biggest barriers for non-native experts coming in is that they see their efforts not being as recognized or welcomed as they believe they ought to be. There is little understanding that generations of oppression, of abuse, of being second class, or not even second class, but being the lowest class possible, will result in anger and resentment towards that whole system. It may not be at those counsellors or social workers personally, it's not an individual thing. I think it has to be recognized that anyone who has been abused, who has been treated as second class or the lowest class possible, will feel anger and a lot of hostility. That hostility will remain around for a long time.

Similarly, when we look at the situation of battered women where the man says, "well I'm not like that any more, sorry, I'm trying to change", several years down the road there will still be mistrust, there will still be reluctance to believe that things are changing and that things are getting better. There is always going to be a sort of cellular memory, and I think no matter how hard people try, it is going to be around for a long time.

I think people who are doing community work from the outside, particularly what I call the "non-native expert", are wondering why things aren't working. They say, "why don't they appreciate my selflessness, why don't they appreciate my good intentions, and can't they see that I'm not like everybody else?" But it's not the individual, I think that people look with distrust at the whole society, what it has done with our people historically.

And those situations are still there, where there are rashes of suicides and 1/2 to 1/3 of our youth population is being wiped out. We have to look at the causes of the distress in those young people and who is really responsible. Is it their parents, who themselves were reacting to that kind of abuse? It's a larger, societal thing, and bandaid solutions, going in and doing a few crisis intervention workshops, are not going to get the job done. I think there is going to have to be large scale responsibility taken.

Statements like mine will always be received with: Well, you know, you're living in the past and you can't continue to be like this. Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough reparation made. There are still people who have experienced the jail system, the residential school system, the foster home system and the welfare system. A majority of people on the reserves are still experiencing that, and for them to change overnight is just not going to happen. A lot of native people now are making some really valiant efforts to change things. Often those same people are still affected by the dynamics that affect the communities overall, and it's really difficult.

Things have been so dysfunctional. I don't like that word, but I think things have been in that state for so long that people are afraid of change. There is a denial that something is even wrong, that things have to change, and then there is a sense of despair when suicides and violence occurs. And when some awareness starts happening. Because whole scale change is a pretty scary thought to some communities, like taking away people's livelihood. It means the whole system has to change, which means the system of government has to change as well. There are the haves and the have-nots in native communities, and the haves are not going to want to let go of the status they have, the income they have, the special ways they are able to do things differently than anyone else. Those same patterns repeat themselves in native communities.

Q: In your conference paper you wrote that non-Native experts as well as Native experts who have adopted stereotypical thinking (internalized colonization, you called it) are often resented by First Nations communities. Please discuss this historical distrust.

A: One of the biggest mistakes made by native social and community workers in native communities is that it is too easy to pick up a course or a model, or to go to a conference and learn some other ways of doing things and accept that as the way it will work in your community, and then push that on your people. Those things have been done to native communities for so long.

When people pick up a model or approach and take it into a native community, and I'm speaking of native people themselves, they have to understand it may not always be received with open arms, because all the people will see is that here is someone who picked up the tools of those people over there and are coming back to use them here. Often what the workers do not do is to take the basic knowledge and innovate that to suit the situation.

I think there is often not enough creativity in the methods of workers who are attempting to deal with social problems. It all comes down to empowerment of the people you are working with. I think if you go into a community and ask, "What is it you would like to see, what is it you really need, what is it that you don't like about the other system?", then you can put something together that is realistic and will work.

I think things like circle sentencing are really well-intentioned, and sometimes they may be viable. You can look at a model like circle sentencing theoretically and say, wow, this is great, but when it actually comes to applying it you must ask, OK, what are the things that you need in order to do circle sentencing. You need knowledgeable people. You need people who can be objective, who can make decisions without a lot of personal ties and personal experiences getting in the way.

It's very difficult in native communities to find elders who have not been abused somehow or have not been offenders themselves. The notion of the esteemed elder is a good one, but they are few and far between. The elders, like anyone else in the community, particularly the people committing the abuse and those being abused, are in the same situation. So I say that we have to get a council of healthy elders...that's a good idea, now where do we start looking, where do we find those people? I think that's always a big drawback. Like anything else, if you are going to hire a team of educators or a team of economic developers, those people will be chosen from a group of "in" people on the reserve or in the community, and that is usually the case in circle sentencing or the healing circles and so on. The people chosen for that are there because of circumstances. I think those are some of the problems that might be encountered with a notion such as circle sentencing.

Some really good work has been done by some communities such as Hollow Water in Manitoba. Theoretically, their model is workable, but I think it's been through trial and error that those people have come to understand that before we can start examining and judging and giving advice to others, we have to look at ourselves. I think that has been one of their most powerful lessons and they have done really well in that area.

End of Part One.
Part Two of this interview will be included in the Fall 1996 issue of the BCIFV
Newsletter.