00:00:03 Allen
I’m known these days as a conduit between Indigenous and Western worlds. I find myself, I have a role to play standing on one foot and to the other. As I was growing up, I got in trouble in the neighborhood. Even my first experience going through school that was run by nuns, and this is the law that’s been around since 1887, that every child from the age of fire to age of 16 must attend these schools, the Indian Residential Schools. It was about the elimination of identity, including your languages, your worldview, everything. I made you strong. And I remember getting my hand strapped by the head nun almost on a daily basis for things that I did or didn’t do. I was five years old. There’s essentially… I have learned how to accept pain. Pain was just part of life. Now, in 1970, they revised this Indian Act to allow parents or grandparents in this case, to raise a child in their home. There was such a tremendous need to get to know the Indigenous peoples. At the same time, own people need to learn about their own history because they weren’t taught this at school. It was only in the last 15 years. The focus now is to introduce that as a curriculum in our schools. So that’s where we are with this. So when you ask me the original question about contemporary and traditional, I am very much both.

00:01:52 Rosemary
This is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and today I’m speaking with Alan Sutherland. Welcome, Alan. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as there’s so much I’d like to learn about you, your work, your community, and the trauma that you’re supporting Indigenous people in healing.

00:02:27 Allen
Glad to be here.

00:02:28 Rosemary
Alan, I’ll start your introduction myself and then I’m going to invite you to take over.

00:02:34 Allen
Yes.

00:02:34 Rosemary
You’re an esteemed Anishinaabe elder, traditional knowledge keeper, healer and historian whose work in the public has made a generational difference in Canada. Now, Alan, what else would you like to say to introduce yourself to our listeners?

00:02:51 Allen

I’ll introduce myself in my language. I’ll introduce myself in my language. [Speaking in Anishinaabe language] What I just said is I am White Spotted Horse is my spirit name. I’m from the Lynx Clan. I am from Skownan First Nation of Treaty 2 territory here in Canada and I’m Anishinaabe. But you can call me Alan Sutherland. That’s my common English name.

00:03:23 Rosemary
Thank you, Allen. Anything else you’d like to say about the work you do? Anything to introduce yourself?

00:03:29 Allen
Oh gosh, as we don’t finish off 2024 and this full moon that we recently had, it’s about reflection of who we are, our journey that we have taken, as we look towards 2025. And there’s a lot of reflection for me. What more can I do to contribute, not only to myself, my family, my community, but my country, the world? And I’ve been doing, as a historian, as a knowledge keeper and now recently as an elder. I reflect back that a lot of my work, it’s been 25 years now, when it comes to getting Canadians, Manitobans, or our people to understand the impact of colonization, especially in the history of Canada, but its impact is felt around the world. So I’ve been reflecting on who I am. I live this history. I came into this history where they weren’t even teaching who we are, as peoples of Canada. And the thing about it was, they not only don’t teach this in schools, but Canadians or new Canadians never knew we existed. And the thing is, our identity was really much taken away because I grew up being called an Indian, which is a colonial word for new peoples that are discovered historically at the East Indian, West Indian because we look similar or our colour. So that there is a lot of that was something that I lived through and I wanted to know why it happened.

00:05:25 Rosemary
Yeah, that’s a very good question and you are absolutely right. I was born in Canada and I did not know about the residential schools in Canada. However, I grew up in Australia and I knew what happened to the Aboriginal people there. It’s astonishing because it was many generations that the Indigenous schools existed in Canada. Can you walk us through back to when that started?

00:05:52 Allen
Almost weekly when I speak to groups, I will talk about these two world views of Canada, and one world view, as I get into it, is an Indigenous worldview that talks about our identity, who we are. Then it goes back to… we had these four spirits that were lowered to the earth in the 4 parts of the earth garden. And these four will have their own places to eventually evolve and grow and they become many peoples of the world. So these are these 4 colours that represent that, the yellow and the white and the black and eventually the red. So I would go into the origin stories of indigenous people in terms of what life was like as survivor societies, prior to contact with Christopher Columbus 500 years ago. And then I’ll go and talk about world events that took place on the other side of the world from the likes of the times of the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church, and that these European laws that eventually from the 13th century became laws that will eventually have a tremendous impact on the world. And then later on, they came over on our side of the garden, and they started taking over. They felt that our worldview doesn’t work with their worldview because we see everything as one, we see that the creators and everything. But try to explain that 500 years ago when they don’t believe that there was spirit in the trees and the water. Even in your dog Fido, there’s no such thing. But they teach us now in schools because now they call it energy. We say Manitou, but they call it energy and everything, energies and everything so, but it was slow in the making. Yeah, in terms to understand each other’s worldview, we were bombarded with one world view, but they never got to know who we are.

00:08:18 Rosemary
It was all one directional. It was all coming, telling, but never asking.

00:08:25 Allen
That’s right. It wasn’t that way in the beginning. There was a period, we called it a golden age of the per trade. They are very much in the minority. They’re showing up, didn’t know how to shelter themselves. They know how to feed themselves. And it’s through the notion of it, generosity of people of the kind heart always helped out. There was over 250 years of getting to know each other, but more and more people are showing up all the time. Next thing you know it because the European diseases like influenza, smallpox, it devastated the landscape. Now we’re no longer the majority, but we’re struggling. We’re still in large numbers, but we are struggling. With the advent of these, the world is changing all around us. But I’ll just make this one point. 

Canada has a unique history that it buried for so long. Canada did not become a country through the means of battles, warfare or or buying. They basically they asked, can we live with you? And that’s from the days of the newcomers coming in the form of a setting up a trading post. But eventually more and more are coming and they ask can you live with you? So there was this arrangement through trading that says yes, let’s live together, that created the foundation of what we call Canada today, to create the second largest landmass country in the world from coast to coast. Not through a means of conflict. It was a means of sharing, but as Canadians are able to create their own British North American acts, getting permission from Queen Victoria that we wish to be a country too, and that became the Dominion of Canada. So even though they were making treaties, their intent was not to share. So five years later they created the Indian Act, which is the same model that many countries have borrowed from, such as South Africa, into apartheid. They use the same policies of how you overcome a country using laws. That’s where it went wrong. Five years after Confederacy, they started saying that we are the ones who are in charge over you and your lens, and they ignored the treaty obligations.

00:10:59 Rosemary
Thank you for that history, Alan. I’m actually speaking to you from South Africa right now.

00:11:04 Allen
Okay.

00:11:05 Rosemary
And I’m very aware of the two worldviews because there is the history, the colonial history that is taught in schools and then the actual history that is ignored. But I’m smiling a little bit as I say this, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s ironic. And I guess where the architects of apartheid missed the boat, was they didn’t realize they shouldn’t go public with the oppression that they were inflicting on the majority of the population. And that seems to be what Canada did so well for so long, because apartheid only existed for less than half a century, whereas the oppression in Canada went on and on. So and, and you see this repeated all over the world. Wherever colonizers moved in, however, they got their hands on a territory that didn’t belong to them, whether it was through trading as you just described, or through warfare, through battle. Yeah, it’s pretty much a global event. Would you like to say anything about the commonalities of the approach between different colonized nations or regions?

00:12:16 Allen
Like I said earlier, it started with a Pope. They were basically to protect the people going to the Middle East with The Crusades. They made a law that essentially says if you find resistance of any kind, especially if they’re pagans or heathens, uncivilized, you can defend yourself or to protect yourself, you create laws over them. So that became, eventually other laws that go on top of that, that have impacted the rest of the world, even in Canada from Christopher Columbus to Cadiz on the East Coast, that all you have to do is be sanctioned by a Kingdom or a King or Queen. And then you get a charter and you read out the charter that on behalf of your King or Queen, I proclaim or I take over these lands and everything on it. So it’s a little ritual, just plant your cross, plant your flag, say the words Bing, Bang, Noom, Shazam, whatever words you want to make magic with. It is now owned by the European Kingdom and guess what? This went everywhere.

00:13:32 Rosemary
Yes, it did. That was a very avaricious time. Lots of people taking their piece of the colonial pie all over the world. So it was a very dark time for many indigenous peoples. So that leads me to a question. Can you tell us about your role as a connection between traditional and contemporary worlds, or perhaps share a story how that of how that plays out?

00:13:57 Allen
OK, yeah, I’ve known these days as a conduit between Indigenous and the Wetern World. I find myself I have a role to play standing one foot then to the other, and I’ll explain this to you. This is growing up then a semi isolated community called Skownan First Nation that had only one road. In surrounded by beautiful lakes and rivers, and the agriculture belt was essentially 15 miles away. But I grew up in a community of less than 400 people and we are very much living the life with our ancestors. We’re a survival society. My grandfather had cattle that he looked after. My grandmother had her garden. My grandfather was a fisherman, commercial fisherman, a hunter trapper, and we had, growing up, initially didn’t have electricity in our cabin.  

Now what really, when I reflect on my life was, I initially was born in Winnipeg, a city that was 3 1/2 hours away and lived in the inner city which is the poorest places you could live in Orlando, Winnipeg. As I was growing up, I got in trouble in the neighborhood. Even my first experience going through school was run by nuns and I remember getting my hand strapped by the head nun almost on a daily basis where things that I did or didn’t do. But this is going to be the topic of our discussions this morning or or today is essentially I have learned how to accept pain. Pain was just part of life. Now, going back, looking back on these things, they revised the Indian Act law that they’ll no longer take children away from their families, their communities, to transport them to far away places. And this is a law that’s been around since 1887 that every child from the age of five to age of 16 must attend these schools, Indian Residential Schools. This is contrary to the treaty that says that we are expecting school to be built in our communities so that everybody’s equal. But the Indian Act wasn’t about that. It was about the elimination of identity, including your languages, your worldview, everything that made you strong. Now in 1970, they revised this Indian Act to allow parents, or grandparents in this case, to raise a child in their home. So here I was getting in trouble. Essentially kicked out of the schools. And my grandparents said, I would love to have him. We’ll raise them and I was brought from the city to the community. Looking back, it was very traumatic because I talked like I did something wrong. I thought this was an abandonment. That’s how it seemed. But looking back, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me because I grew up with those values of a small community that looks after each other, knows how to survive. And the love was there, always, for my grandparents. 

They did not have a chance to raise their own children because the law says you gotta have them over. So my mother went to Camperville, Pine Creek Indian Residential School. My uncles went. A lot of our people had to go there, and this is the first time my grandparents were now able to raise a child. So I am impacted by that history directly by witnessing those laws that took place for our people. 

So that’s why when I come from that point of view, it’s all those traditional values. And by the time I left to go into the world to make a living, that was in 1999 when I fully went to Winnipeg. I started the journey working for all levels of government, eventually/ Because at that time they didn’t have a lot of people that had that knowledge of that history, knowledge on the way of life of our community members. The impact of Indian Residential Schools. I was taught by my elders, this oral traditions, this history. So that was a leg up with working for government that are now shifting towards. This is 20 years of 24, 25 years ago when they’re now shifting towards that. Maybe we have to do something about the play to the indigenous people. There was a societal shift because at urbanization there was more to the city… there’s a competition for jobs and the applications and those workplaces was coming lower and lower. So they need to change their ideas in terms of who’s going to work for you, how do you maintain your business? And it was an obvious solution here, is Indigenous people need to participate fully in all aspects of government, all aspects of jobs, in order for society to shift that stay in prosperity. So I got busy.

00:19:18 Rosemary
I’m sure you did.

00:19:20 Allen
And I got to learn everything about the banking industry, profits, nonprofits, governments. So I gained a lot of experience when it came to diversity and equity. So I started off in areas of equity. I says OK, there’s the equity law has been there since 1970s. But you didn’t really do anything when it comes to indigenous population on tourism, giving them fair dealings, give them education, get them jobs. So My first role was to educate as a business plan to corporations, why it’s a good business, to take this segment, a very young segment of population. But later on I shifted because there was such a tremendous need to get to know the indigenous peoples. At the same time, our own people need to learn about their own history because they weren’t taught this at schools. It was only in the last 15 years. The focus now is to introduce that as a curriculum in our schools. So that’s where we are with this. So when you ask me the original question about contemporary and traditional, I am very much both.

00:20:30 Rosemary
And I’m so happy to hear that story. I’m so glad that you were raised by your grandparents. How old were you when you went back to them and began your community training, if I can call it that?

00:20:42 Allen
I was five years old, and you know what, at that time, our ceremonies, our teachings wasn’t there, just how to survive onto the land. Later on, I was going to other communities and they’re starting to build that up. The ceremonies are starting to evolve. So I was a health director at 94 when I started bringing those traditions back to our community. Sweat lodges, healing ways, and so forth. Because it was 1950 that was the last time we had those things well and now as has grown.

00:21:23 Rosemary
Well, that brings up another question. We’ve talked a little bit about the colonization process and the residential schools. I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit or perhaps share a story of how this trauma of colonization impacted people on an individual level. Like clearly, there was a decimation of culture, traditions were swept away. But I know you also work as a healer. So I’m wondering if you could just give us a snapshot.

00:21:55 Allen
Yes, the impact of that experiencing colonization and Indian Act policies. One of the saving graces was that impact did not affect my own community until after World War One. Because nobody came to our area, we were left alone. But they started after World War One. There was municipal community. Tourism was big in the United States to come into the isolated area. So we got these Americans, hunters and fishermen coming in. They gave us. jobs of guiding them. But now you have the church coming in. You had the Roman Catholic Church coming in. Later on, a couple of decades later you had the Pentecostal Church coming in. So this were these  two Christian groups that came to a small community of less than 400 and now you’re pitting each other against each other in terms of which Bible is the correct Bible. So they’re now coming to get the children, to take them to Indian Residential Schools. So as I said earlier, we had a regulatory chiefs and my great grandfather, Armos Nepinak, was the last one to have that hereditary system. So he died in 1950. So the Indian Act was now being imposed in our community. We’ll no longer have our traditional governess. We’re now gonna have parliamentary European design, Canadian design, Indian Act election, which is three years later. But looking back on it, talking to the elders, he was the last one that held them all back like he did. He didn’t want anything. Interference. He was still practicing our traditional ways. He had his pipe. He had his sweat lodge, but all that left our community after he passed away. Even on medicine, people went away. Now, you asked about the impact of colonization. It started with the children, yeah. If you want to take over any community, you might go after their warriors, you might go after their medicine, keep on their healers or the women or the elders. You might go after all parts of the community, but the one that had the tremendous impact that destroyed the spirit of any community is that if we take the children away.

00:24:19 Rosemary
Yeah, I would agree with that. And  just what I remember about the Australian Indigenous people, it went on for generations and they called the loss, those times when their children were being taken away, they called them stolen generations. And it did. It took the heart out of people. Yeah, it was unfortunately very well calculated and I can’t even imagine not being able to raise your own children. That would be just so devastating.

00:24:46 Allen
Just to imagine a community might have the babies, Those babies gonna grow up, and they’ll have to grow up sometimes at the age of four, and be taken away. Now what’s left behind is devastation. The shame. Men are powerless, warrior societies are now powerless because they created a penitentiary here in Winnipeg, just a few years after the Indian Act was brought up, and they needed to take those that violated these laws. So the first occupants were Chiefs that didn’t hold their people in line, as they say. If you were a father that didn’t want to have your little daughter named Mary to be taken away by a priest, (then the RCMP, which is our police here in Canada), and he says you’re not taking her. They get arrested for four to six months, hard labour working in the quarry at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary. So that existed since 1878 and it still exists with 80% of the population indigenous. From that colonization that we ripped away now, a child who only speaks Anishinaabe or Ojibway or Cree for that matter, or another language from the community they came from. Imagine a four year old girl named Mary and Ojibway is the only thing that she knows and they’re punishing her from… immediately, they’re cutting her hair, they’re taking away her garments, the beautiful beadery that was given to her and her blanket and all that was thrown in the garbage. And then you get deloused. You got forcibly washed down and then you’re told to stay quiet. And a little child only knows what to do is to cry. So now you’re seeing at the beginning of a traumatic event from lost innocence, and then they go through life to not talking about it because you’re now these establishments, these Indian Residential Schools are run by religion, religious groups. In our case, in our community, the Roman Catholics, which is the largest group in Canada that ran these places. And the one thing you’d never do is say anything bad about the church. Even if something bad happens, you cannot speak about it.

00:27:16 Rosemary
And we know that bad things did happen. It’s all coming to light. And oh, I can only imagine the emotions, like going back to the community leaders that were sent to jail, the elders, the tribal chiefs. I can only imagine. I’m guessing anger, shame, frustration. And with the little children, like confusion, abandonment issues. Yeah. Shame. What have you found the predominant emotions are, that can emerge? Because I understand emotions were suppressed too as a coping strategy..

00:27:47 Allen
Yeah. And just before I answer that, like humanity was a little buffered for a little while because it’s within our 100 years of our memory, but this was going on for three generations. And it’s only been recently, because the last Indian residential school was closed down in 1997. So this is not ancient past. We’re talking about people like myself, who went to indian residential school. I’m 3 generations, but others are four or five generations. Now, as a historian, they don’t teach any of this stuff at schools. They don’t talk about the Indian Residential Schools, they don’t talk about the Indian Act. They don’t even talk about treaties. And yet it’s such a beautiful story. How did Canada become a country…

Now when I was for a while talking about the big picture, The impact of this worldview, impact of what happened to our community, our society. And I’m wondering about the big split. The big split was after treaties done in this really split apart for a long time, and then after World War 1, World War 2, we contributed in safeguarding our own lands, and their own countries because the one thing they can’t stop us from doing is protecting our own lands. So after World War 2 things changed because Canada is one of the founding fathers of the United Nations, and Canada was also involved in the Geneva code on genocide. To prevent this happening in the world, but The thing is in the backyard of Canada, Indian residential school policies and the policies are still there. There was still segregation. So there was that tremendous pressure to say we’ve got to clean up our act. So in 1951, they revised the Indian Act to allow freedoms, freedoms to now leave your reserves because before you need, the pass just to leave and you’re going to get it. But now you could go into the city, look for work, participate like anybody else. But they still keep the Indian Act because for one, the Indian Act says we are supposed to share this country, and we decided to make you wards of Canada. Even to this day, I’m still a ward of Canada. I’m not totally free. But they owe us half of the wealth in the country. So that’s why they don’t want to get rid of the Indian Act and two years from now it’ll be150th year of the Indian Act. There is no other race legislation in the world, but Canada has one. But the changes were slow. By fighting for your own rights and your freedom since the 50’s and then to be recognized in 1970 that we are part of Canada. They’re slowly letting out information to a point where 10 years ago there’s a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that says here are the 94 calls of action for all Canadians, a mandate, national mandate that you got to know this history, you gotta know about Indigenous people and who they are. 

So to get back to that, how the impact that colonization through trauma – it started a long time ago. It’s an intergenerational impact. Now to finally start addressing it, because my focus was the big picture history. Why did it happen? What was the mindset? I got to understand the motivation. 

Nelson Mandela, when he came out of 27 years of hard labour, had no revenge in his heart/ He says. “We all have to work at this together.” So he came up with truth, reconciliation and healing. This is  the healing component that Canada has left out. We’re still in the Truth and Reconciliation period, but they don’t give… They give a little bit of penance, a little bit of funding where to address that healing that trauma. At the time they never called it trauma, but it was really post traumatic stress syndrome and it’s rampant. It’s everywhere. We just got so used to it. Canadians got used to it, but our own people got so used it. We’re just starting to address it. No, last 20 years. 15 years.

00:32:12 Rosemary
Definitely.

00:32:13 Allen
Now, it’s a big thing. You know, it’s really, it’s about focusing on the individual. I just want to say that I shifted from a worldview to how it has more impact and how to address trauma, is the person in front of you.

00:32:27 Rosemary
Very well said. Thank you. Thank you. And I’m thinking addressing it is all well and good and I’m so glad you’re doing the work you’re doing, but we need you to replicate yourself so that there are many other people with your unique skills, which I understand are not readily available to, to do this work. But I’m thinking of people today in mixed societies. The trauma carries on, doesn’t it? There are unthinking or hurtful comments. I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to how the trauma continues when indigenous people encounter non indigenous people in this country.

00:33:13 Allen
Speaking more closely to home, how this impacts my community today. We’re not the same people we were 25 years ago because we have grown now to be 1,500 in population. But we have this thing called lateral violence, and I’m trying to counter it, with teachings that to look at it as lateral kindness because we have our strengths, but don’t let this colonization and its impact define who we are today. 

Now I want to speak about Compassionate Inquiry because I think it’s the greatest approach to this, because Anishinaabe, it means that we’re people of a good heart. And what we do is we are part of that beautiful environment with Mother Earth, Aki. We’re just part of it. We’re not over it, not above it. We’re part of it, and that’s where the compassion comes from. That spirit of it all, is in your heart. So when our ceremonies is all about our heart, it’s about helping others. So I went on and learned about different techniques of.. I want to search for spirit and energy medicine, somatic work. And then I went and started working for a child welfare agency, West Region CFS, which is a large group that are taking now Compassion Inquiry. That’s where the link is. And I’m there. That we have a chance to change colonial laws, reflect our needs and our protocol, our ceremonial view, that the child is the centre of our universe. Other than reinforcement. Yeah, when something goes wrong.

00:34:57 Rosemary
Because Gabor often talks about how Indigenous communities model some of the best parenting he’s ever seen in the world. 

00:35:07 Allen
Yeah.

00:35:07 Rosemar
Two perspectives on that. It was absolutely criminal to remove children from such a rich parenting environment. So I wonder if I could ask you a little bit about, as we know in compassion and inquiry, the body keeps the score and the body says no. I looked up some health statistics from the Alberta Health Services. They compared Indigenous communities, people in Indigenous communities and people in non indigenous populations, and they’re very grim. I’ll just give you a couple of examples and I’ll ask you to speak to them. Life expectancy, the life expectancy of men, Indigenous men is 8.9, almost 10 years shorter than non indigenous men. With women it’s 9.6 years shorter. So it’s even worse with women. And overall this was in Alberta, they said the life expectancy is 14 years shorter for indigenous people than non indigenous populations. Infant mortality is 2 times higher. Heart disease rates are 50% higher. Death rate from stroke, twice as high, the rate of tuberculosis, 44 times higher, the rate of type 2 diabetes, four times higher. And when we get to the suicide rates, it’s absolutely horrendous. So you know, when the body is speaking in this way, speaking to the trauma. I wonder if you’d like to comment about that?

00:36:40 Allen
Yeah, when people come and ask me for healing, it’s usually at a desperate state. They’d tried it all. They heard the bad news from the doctor. They’re given all kinds of medication and now they’re open to try, maybe from an Indigenous healer. Good. You’re now coming through the door. And I always found that 90% of the healing is always in the mind because that’s where the source, where things went wrong. That’s what your body doesn’t think for itself, your response to the mind. So what is the mind thinking? What is the mind going through? So I always say, look, we’re gonna, we’re gonna clean this up. We’re gonna go work with what is the turmoil, what’s going on with your mind? Because now you’re going to give your body a chance to heal.

00:37:26 Rosemary
But they come to you and it’s a last ditch effort. They’ve been diagnosed, that doesn’t give you a lot of scope to work with.

00:37:34 Allen
But it’s not impossible.

00:37:36 Rosemary
I’d love to hear about that. Can you share an example?

00:37:39 Allen
I’ll give an example. Even my own wife had breast cancer. It was on the left hand side. Now she looks after herself, lives a good life in terms of good family background. But knowing what I know, something was manifested. So we said OK as soon as she found out this happened. She’s crying and I said what’s going on? And she says, I was told I have cancer. So right away, I knew that the first thing you gotta do is address the fear, because her fear is bombarded with saying I’m gonna die now. This is it. So I had my networks of course, I said. So we’re going to go see my friend with the medicine man who knows how to deal with this stuff. And he was like a 2 hour drive away and he said it was available. It’s like took her, because I know for a fact that she needs to know that we can do things because I told her we’ll work with the medical system, but we have our way, so we did ceremonies that she was given. Medicine needs to be done. No, I was still going to work because I want her to not have that here with this fear will shut you down. Disease will spread. So as she was going through the system, chemotherapy… it was easy for her because I would use energy work for her to not feel the draining of her energy. 

But what really hit home was now I have to focus on what’s the background here. So it’s a combination of hypnotherapy reiki, I put her on a table and I work with her ancestors and we work together. While I was working on the body. It took her to a place of healing. Her ancestors were there anyway, after I said it done, and now it’s time for reflection. I said how was that for you? She said out. I’m going to be OK, I’m gonna be alright, Her grandmother showed up. It says we did the healing for you, You’re going to be fine. But she said tell him, tell your husband it is. And I said, what do you have to tell me? At that time we had our careers, grandsons, and later on another grandson. We’re saving up for this place that I have today, so I’m very strict with the spending. And now being grandmother, she wants to spoil her grandchild. So we activated one of his credit cards. What the big limit and all that stuff she maxed out, but she didn’t know how to tell me because she knows I’ll get upset. And then she didn’t voice it or tell anybody about this. So she was manifesting all this shame, it became a cancer, and it grew..

00:40:27 Rosemary
Oh.gosh!

00:40:28 Allen
So I said, you know what, money is just energy. We’ll find the money. Next thing I know it pay it off her credit card eliminating the fear of itself. But to know I forgive you, but you got to forgive yourself once again, I go back to 90% of the healing is it has to be addressed in your mind.

00:40:51 Rosemary
And I guess that’s where Compassionate Inquiry comes in, because it focuses on the emotions, the root emotions and sadness, fear, shame, lots of variations of those in the people that you work with.

00:41:05 Allen
And it is to get to your question about statistics. It grows, but it doesn’t come down. Why are we not improving? We have great medical care in Canada going back to it, if you were holding all that in, all that pain as a child, it was a nightmare. Even blocked it off for your own psyche protection, but not tell anybody about it, is that your you are suffering and and then through that these terrible illness and disease because your body’s telling you there’s something is wrong here. There’s turmoil. 

I was invited to a conference last week to talk to men. It was a men’s healing gathering, and I’m just standing among them a little bit with my mic talking about our common experience. But man were shut down. It can be warriors that there was shame, there’s intergenerational impacts that that hurt that Shane was carried over to the next generation. And I says for you men who are lucky to have a spouse, no partner that listens to you or have the means to go and hear how this history and colonization and in your own pain, your own trauma impacted you. Congratulations, you’re on a healing journey, but the majority you’ll hear young and old, you’re not talking about shame you’re not talking about your emotions. You’re not talking about your anger, which is the one thing that really is shown all the time, this mistrust, all this. I says you gotta get help. Is that a Bring that story out of you. It’s your story. You’re not a victim of it. You’re that’s just your journey that once you you look at it and release it, you become resilient. You keep the story, but you don’t keep the energy. And what you have is now you become a Wounded Warrior. You’re an effective war because you got the wounds to show for it, because you’ve been there. Now I’ll help others.

00:43:10 Rosemary
And that speaks beautifully to one of the key questions in Compassionate Inquiry. Who did you tell? And I’m sure like I, I love hearing that you are encouraging people to talk to each other, to let it out, to share their stories, so important as you’ve just illustrated. So thank you for that. And I want to just reference something, when I was looking at your website, you have learned so many different healing modalities and your healing bundles. I’m curious, do you pull whatever from the modalities that you’ve learned from working with the ancestors? Is that something that you do on an individual basis when you work with people?

00:43:54 Allen
Altogether, what is the common denominator is spirit.

00:43:58 Rosemary
Yeah.

00:44:00 Allen
All modalities are just as equal to each other when it comes to healing, but it’s a different process. It’s a different approach to things, but it’s still the same spirit. So for me. I call them bundles because they’re around me and I’m not sure which one I’m going to use. I might use a combination of both or few of them. So When a person sits in front of me, I’m connecting to them from my heart, my essence, my intuition. What would help here? So I have my own spirit guides that says what can work with their spirit guides and saying what approach do we need to do here? See they might come very specific, but is this like Compassionate Inquiry when you’re asking what is your intention? Same process but I asked him to bring to back because tobacco for us is permission to you get past their free will. You’re actually giving me permission out to go where you need to go. So it’s the same thing with Compassionate Inquiry. You wanted to get him from being heady and then you do that breath exercise and other techniques. We bring them down to their heart. Now you make the heart to heart connection. Yeah, even in that moment, I don’t know what’s how I’m gonna approach it. So for me with compassionate acquiring, it encompasses most of that we’re talking about, because we’re going to the loss of innocence, we’re going to the inner child, we’re going to what’s impacting them the most. And a lot of it is post traumatic stress. A lot of it is that feelings. So the process from coming here to here is how we find we do our best we can. So when you seeing all that background still like even Doctor Gabor Mate, he’s always searching for the next piece to add on and I can really relate to him. And then he came and worked for our people on the streets of Vancouver and get to understand the impact of colonization and what’s impacting them today. And he’s shifted towards compassion, the heart of it all, the spirit of it. And he’s on that journey. Meanwhile, on a spiritual right, on that journey, learning about therapy, I didn’t know I was supposed to learn more about thought therapy. But The thing is it, it has its balance to now able to break it down and teach it, but there’s so much similarities when it comes to spirituality and in the end it always comes down to that spirit.

00:46:41 Rosemary
Absolutely. And I’d had a question for you, which you’ve already answered, about why Compassionate Inquiry is landing so well in the Indigenous healing circles and Gabor’s work. You’ve already covered that off. I’ll go back to another question, and this is a big picture question. From your perspective, what will it take to truly heal the trauma that’s rooted in colonial oppression? And obviously, storytelling, work on yourself, recognizing the role of emotions, the role of spirit, but within the descendants of the colonizers – how can we contribute to the healing that needs to be done?

00:47:24 Allen
You see where we are bringing back our identity. We’re bringing back all the things that we lost through colonial laws and changing our core beliefs. Now we have to reflect on this. That’s part of the healing journeys. Reflect on this. We are showing ourselves out there by wearing our ribbon shirts. Women are. They’ve got the ribbon skirts. We are in the open. We are proud of who we are. We survived. They even use the word surviving. We survived the storm years and survived it. We’re still here. That rediscovery, that resiliency is starting to become more and more. And what’s really helping is Canadian societies are joining us in this healing journey for all of us as we have those orange shirts that every child matters, that movement. The other movement is to remember that murdered and missing and murdered Indigenous women and men. There’s an image of the red, the red dress. This is now starting to be where we’re supposed to be in reconciling our past together. But the healing still needs to be done. It’s not enough healing to be done. We got to do more and more of it to help each other, to have these healing lodges and healing programs for all of us. And I created my own laws taheen lots in the last three years so that other healers can come and learn new techniques and they go back to their communities and apply it. Because it’s not just a Western treatment centre kind of approach. It’s it’s overall how we have all these ancient teachings that’s going to help us get there, our mind, body and spirit and emotions. So to answer your question in terms of how can we roost this, it’s gonna be a while, but the best approach is that we’re going to have our own people doing it for ourselves. Before it was you had to get the service somewhere and they come in. No, our own people, our healers. And we’re going to reestablish our ancestors world as healers. And in order to break this vicious cycle is to heal our ancestors of what they went through. But we gotta heal ourselves and not lose the fact that the next generations will not have to feel that pain or what we or ancestors like. We break the cycle so the children’s to come will never have to know that.

00:50:04 Rosemary
And you’ve just painted a picture and I’m going to check in and make sure I understand correctly. It’s very much what Resma Manikin says in his book, my grandmother’s hands. And he uses the term like white skinned, black skinned, brown skinned. People of the same skin colour need to do their own healing first before integrating with people of other skin colours. But what you’re suggesting does support that. You’ve got to do a certain amount of healing yourself, but there’s also the education and the dialogue with people from other backgrounds. For example, between the Indigenous people and the descendants of the colonizing force. There needs to be more knowledge and awareness of exactly what’s going on because I imagine just as there’s anger and shame in the Indigenous population, there’s tremendous guilt in the colonizing population, the descendants of the colonizers, and that can shut people down. They won’t feel worthy. They won’t want to interact and connect. So did I understand that roughly correctly?

00:51:12 Allen
Yeah, the first part is that we need to heal our own families, our own communities, ourselves as a group. I don’t go with that approach. My approach is our original origin stories of the four colours. I went into the four, four parts of the garden, but they came from a source, the source of it all, and it was good, beautiful. And this is where the narrative comes in. The creator was lonely, so he created another part of itself, of creation, which is a masculine, feminine energy. That started another process from a big bang to a second bang, which is that we are the children of this creation, and that’s the spirit. That’s the one that blasted out and all everywhere, all different dimensions, galaxies, planets and so forth, including the one on Earth. There were these forests that started going to their places. The Creator wanted diversity. THey didn’t want everything to be the same. If you look at our planet, everything’s diversity. Why not the people? Not just because we’re different from each other is to know that what’s common about us is that we’re that blue flame, that burst, that went out. Is this that the creator says, I’m going to give you a place over there. If there’s desert over there, I’m gonna give you where the mountains are. I wanna send you to the oceans. I wanna send you to the far north. I want to send you to the challenging places, or paradise. And in the end, there’s going to be so much diversity that the Creator would learn through all this, through your experience, including the life that is good, the bad, the ugly, or the blessings. But in the end, to appreciate diversity, to appreciate the garden itself, to know that we’re all one, That is the image, that is the vision that our ancestors had. It’s in our 7 Fires Prophecies about these events that talks about a choice of embracing our diversity but not looking at our differences and to be separated. So it’s gonna be the same all the life about materialism and individualism. That’s a choice. Or what about a choice of Oneness, saying that we are all one? Ain’t that what’s going on today? We have a lot of people who are non indigenous coming to our ceremonies now because they’re seeking answers. They’re coming to the Sundance. They’re looking for their own healing and what becomes the common denominator in all our teachings? All of us, is spirit, love and we want a better place for all of us.

00:54:10 Rosemary
Beautifully said. Thank you, Alan. Thank you. I’m going to wrap up just by quoting something I saw on your website because this whole conversation has illustrated it beautifully. Your headline, I think on your home page talks about embracing the journey of bridging traditional and contemporary worlds for holistic wellness and historical cultural awareness. So bravo, you’ve been doing an amazing job the whole time we’ve been talking of embodying that. And what I’d like to ask, before we close today, is for you to have your last say. You’ve got the stage. You’ve got the opportunity to whisper something in the ear of all of our listeners, something to leave them with, to ponder perhaps, or to take action on. What would you like to say to everyone who’s listening today?

00:54:59 Allen
Maybe this one last teaching. There’s always a teaching, but I use this teaching to talk about what is life, what is energy, what is spirit, what is Manitou? And we went through these stages where a lot of it was core belief systems, a core understanding. And that could be limiting. But to evolve to a next level is to say there is no limit. And some will even go as far as saying, sky is the limit. That’s a limitation. So a lot are now in that second. We call it the fort world, a transitional, a cocoon state. Some will call us spirituality, but the third part is it’s not necessarily a spiritual understanding. There’s a third part of it. As you evolve. Also humanity is going through it, like it or not. So you’re in a soup. some are easy to go through this, because they see it more as a blessing than something that says, what it’s going on here? And I get phone calls all the time. What’s going on here? Because you get pain. This is you’re getting downloads, you’re shifting the evolution of your soul. That’s basically you’re getting rid of all stuff that you don’t need anymore. And 2025 like it’s still going to be like the birthing. Get ready for that. But your gifts are here too. So from a caterpillar to a cocoon, you become a butterfly. And then you got a divine intelligence where there’s no limit, but just to know who you are. You’re awakened to the fact that you always were a butterfly. I’ll leave it at that.

.00:56:43 Rosemary
Allan Sutherland, thank you so much for your time and the wisdom you’ve shared with us today. It’s been an absolute treat to have you as our guest on the Gifts of Trauma podcast.

00:56:55 Allen
It’s my pleasure to share this space with you, Miigwech!

00:56:58 Rosemary
Thank you so much. Thank you.

00:57:07 Kevin
If you’re not a therapist or a healer, but you’ve heard our guest describe the personal transformations they experienced during their Compassionate Inquiry journeys and wonder, what might that be like for me? There is a programme that is offered to anyone who wants to experience the power of Gabor Maté’s approach to trauma healing. I’m Kevin Young and I’ve been facilitating CI Circles since 2022. I’ve seen people transform in many ways. I’ve seen people change beliefs, relationships. I’ve seen people change how they show up in the world. I have seen people literally change how they look in front of my very eyes. There are many, many ways that people change during Compassionate Inquiry Circles. Circles is a10 week small group experience and registrations are open until January 26th. Take the link in the show notes that will bring you to a web page that gives you all you’ll need to figure out if this is for you.00:58:16 Rosemary
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.