Small Cities, Big Issues: Reconceiving Community in a Neoliberal Era by Christopher Walmsley & Terry Kading

Author:Christopher Walmsley & Terry Kading
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Athabasca University
Published: 2018-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

7 Walking in Two Worlds

Aboriginal Peoples in the Small City

Sharnelle Matthew and Kathie McKinnon

The Circle lives. Like the Phoenix, the Circle rises from the ashes of near death with renewed life and vigorous strength. (Derrick 1990, 25)

Today, the Secwepemc communities of south-central British Columbia are engaged in a process of decolonization and healing. The work of truth telling and the rediscovery, reclamation, and resurgence of Secwepemc self-determination and culture are essential to rebuilding communities and nations in the wake of colonization and oppression, past and present. The process of decolonization is holistic: it involves the recovery of a spiritual sense of self, family, and community founded on balance, on interconnectedness with nature and the Creator, and on reciprocity and the integrity of the whole. Most importantly, as Bruyere (1999, 173) observes, it is a “re-identification, re-affirmation and re-assertion of all things Aboriginal.”

One outcome of the process of decolonization is that some of the Secwepemc communities near the small city of Kamloops, British Columbia, now provide certain services to their own members, such as primary and secondary education, basic health care, income assistance, child welfare, and rural policing. However, all of these communities still depend on Kamloops for hospital care, specialized medical services, dental care, and mental health care, as well as for counselling, legal and financial services, postsecondary education, and access to retail outlets and entertainment venues. This means that Secwepemc peoples and those who accompany them on the path to wholeness and healing must “walk within two worlds.”

To make sense of this double reality and to help explain the lived experience of our communities, we often use the metaphors of the Circle and the Box. The Circle represents the cultural reality of Aboriginal communities; the Box symbolizes the dominant cultural world view. In what follows, in hopes of providing a deeper understanding of these metaphors, we will draw on oral histories and teachings of Elders, as well as on historical research, to describe the processes of colonization and oppression from which Aboriginal peoples in our nation and all across Canada are emerging. Although we aim to tell the story of the Secwepemc people as our Elders told it to us, we recognize that our communities are growing and changing. New economic, cultural, and social realities are emerging, and we will describe these as well. As social work practitioners, we constantly confront the effects of colonization, as well as the implementation of unreasonable and often conflicting bureaucratic policies. On a daily basis, we support our people in their own healing in an effort to help them overcome these challenges. Through examples drawn from our own practice, we hope to illustrate our approach to “walking with” our people towards wholeness in light of the differences in world view that exist between the Circle and the Box.

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