'WE HAVE TO DO MORE THAN TREAT THE KIDS'

Innu Leaders Urge Community 'Healing' To Solve Addiction

DAVIS INLET - As Innu parents and leaders search for ways to cope with
children addicted to sniffing gasoline fumes, experts say there's no easy
solution to the social and cultural deterioration behind the tragedy.

Luke Rich, an Innu who lives in Davis Inlet, wants three of his children
sent away from this native community to treat their addiction.

"It's too easy to get gas here," says Rich, 35, who has battled his own
addiction demons for years.

"They have to be taken away to a detoxification centre where they can get
this stuff out of their systems."

But Rich and others in Labrador know it's useless to send the kids away,
have them detoxified and then bring them back to the same poverty, despair
and isolation that drove them to inhale the poisonous vapours.

"We have to do more than treat the kids," Rich says. "We need a long-term
plan to develop a healthy community. That's our only hope."

Even as 12 children from Sheshatshiu were rounded up this week and taken to
a makeshift treatment centre at a military base in Goose Bay, Nfld., the
people of Davis Inlet, 300 kilometres north, were calling for help for
their addicted children.

That community of 600 says it has at least 60 teenagers who are chronic gas
sniffers.

Addiction experts who have worked with native youth say there has to be
community involvement and community healing, if the children are to beat
their addictions.

"In a lot of cases when they go back home and there are no support
structures in place to help them, they're at greater risk," says Wayne
Hammond, a clinical psychologist who helps substance abusers at a centre in
Calgary.

"They realize the disparity between a nurturing and caring environment and
the problems of their home environment. Often that increases their sense of
hopelessness and places them at risk."

Rich knows all about the helplessness and hopelessness that characterize
Davis Inlet and Sheshatshiu, a larger Innu centre with a population of
about 1,200.

Rich sniffed gas when he was a kid, before he graduated to alcohol, an
addiction he has been battling for the past eight years. His alcoholic
father was often too drunk to bother with food and firewood for the
impoverished family.

Now three of Rich's five children are solvent-abusers, and he knows why.

"The culture my father should have taught me died with him," he says.

"I don't know how to make snowshoes or do the traditional stuff that my
father used to do and my grandfather used to do.

"So I'm lost culturally and my kids are lost the same way. We didn't show
our kids how to live off the land, how to make things. I blame myself for
it. I should have known."

But Rich wants to turn things around for himself and his children.

Innu parents and leaders are asking the federal and Newfoundland
governments to help them develop a long-term "healing process" that would
involve not only sending children away for treatment, but also bringing
specialists into the communities for family counselling.

There are also calls for more cultural and recreational activities.

Rich warns if there isn't a co-ordinated approach to treatment, it's doomed
to failure.

He remembers when children were sent away after the 1993 crisis to
rehabilitation centres in the West. Most returned to Davis Inlet after a
few months and quickly returned to their habit.

Innu leaders are renewing calls for more control over their own affairs:
More community treatment centres; more Innu-designed programs, services and
institutions.