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Canadian native communities opening up to reality of AIDS PDF Print E-mail
Written by Michael Swan   
Dream CatchersTORONTO - Liz Pike remembers a woman who came home to Cape Croker, Ont., to die back in the 1990s. And she remembers how the Ojibway people of the community came out to her funeral.

“They all came to say goodbye, a lot of the people who knew her,” recalled Pike, who is employed jointly by the Anglican diocese of Toronto and the Roman Catholic archdiocese to deliver pastoral care in Toronto’s native community. “For us though, everybody goes to funerals. A lot of people came out and said their goodbyes to her. But in life they would tend to avoid her.”

Pike remembers that people from the church in the predominantly Catholic community did visit the woman, but back then there was a lot of fear about people returning from the city bringing AIDS with them.

“It was caregivers, social caregivers, who helped her out most. But ordinary people here in the community didn’t want to be bothered,” she said.

Now at work among some of the people in Canada most likely to contract HIV, Pike finds herself hamstrung on the issue of AIDS. While the disease affects native people far more than the rest of the Canadian population, aboriginal Canadians are also too estranged from the church to seek help from people like Pike.

“Usually, if you mention church to aboriginal people they don’t really want to deal with that,” she said. “Because there’s still quite a lot of resentment towards the church in our own history” due to residential school abuses.

In 2005 16.5 per cent of Canada’s newly diagnosed AIDS cases were among aboriginal Canadians. Natives make up 3.3 per cent of the population.

Oblate missionary Fr. Gary Laboucane, native himself, remembers presiding at funerals in the 1990s.

“Families did not talk about it. They wouldn’t say this person had AIDS,” he said. “Today, that’s not an issue, I don’t think. If someone dies of AIDS, or someone commits suicide, they talk about it.”

These days, running a parish in Slave Lake, Alta., Laboucane doesn’t see AIDS. He knows the disease has hit natives hard across the country, but people in his community haven’t come to him for counselling or advice.

In the 1990s the pointy end of pastoral practice on AIDS was funerals. That was when, finally, the church was involved, said Oblate missionary Fr. Francois Paradis. In the 1990s he was called by families to administer the Anointing of the Sick and preside at funerals while at work on the Saugeen Reserve in Cape Croker. But with modern drugs the disease is less feared and better managed a decade later as he ministers to the native population of downtown Winnipeg.

“I know I’ve heard it’s on the upswing, but I haven’t seen the evidence in the communities I know,” Paradis told The Catholic Register.

From 1991 to 1996, as the infection rate was beginning to soar in native communities, more than a thousand people a year died of AIDS in Canada. At the Vancouver International AIDS Conference in 1996 multi-drug therapies were introduced and First World death rates plummeted. Last year only 59 Canadians died of AIDS.

“We’re basically crisis driven — you know, suicides, alcohol and drug addiction, domestic violence, all that,” explained Oblate Father Chris Rushton from Natuashish, Nfld. “We spend most of our time in healing circles, counselling. So the issue of HIV and AIDS hasn’t really hit us, though we know that it probably will.”

The biggest factor in the spread of HIV among native Canadians has been injection drug use. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada more than 60 per cent of natives with HIV got it from shared needles. Injection drugs are the drug of choice in Canadian prisons because they are easier to hide and to smuggle. Aboriginal Canadians make up 19 per cent of provincial jail inmates and 17 per cent of federal incarcerations.

At the same time, infection rates among native women have soared. In 1993 just under 12 per cent of native AIDS cases were female. By 2003 that number was up to 44 per cent.

Pike would like to see her own ministry among urban aboriginals expand into HIV prevention rather than remain reactive.

“So much preventative stuff can be done aimed at teenagers and youth,” she said.

Pike knows, however, that the church’s complex and subtle message on AIDS might be a tough sell.

“As an aboriginal person myself, I don’t know how I would go into a community and start saying, ‘Hey, you know we have certain responsibilities. You know, God gave us a body that’s like a temple, and we have to look after it. It’s about respecting yourself. It’s about having ideals, not just doing what’s pleasant and fun,’ all that kind of stuff. But I don’t really know how I would go out and do it,” she said.
 
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