Critics argue that Indigenous healing lodges in Canada are underfunded

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SAINT-ALPHONSE-RODRIGUEZ, Que. — Every morning, Indigenous men at the Waseskun Healing Centre north of Montreal gather for a healing circle, where they smudge, share stories and sometimes gain spiritual guidance from elders.

The centre is the equivalent of a minimum-security prison but here, the men are called residents, rather than inmates, prisoners or offenders.

At the end of a healing circle on an early-spring morning, elder Gregoire Canape shares a teaching.

“There’s this idea of bad apples, of taking the rotten one and throwing it out to save the others. But at the heart of that apple, there’s a seed,” Gregoire says.

“If we find the seed and plant it, if we take the rot and turn it into fertilizer — nurture the sapling — we get a tree.”

Gregoire’s analogy speaks to a central tenet of healing lodges like Waseskun. It isn’t a facility to punish or stow away. It’s a place where residents can take the time to heal from traumas and come to terms with the crimes that landed them in custody. Gregoire and his brother, Michael Canape, visit residents every month to guide them on their healing journeys.

Waseskun is among 10 healing centres across the country that are funded by Correctional Service Canada and reserved for Indigenous offenders serving time in federal custody. The lodge, one of the oldest in Canada, sits amid the tall pines and rocky land of Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez, 100 kilometres north of Montreal.

It is the only federally funded healing centre east of Manitoba and is one of six in the country that is Indigenous-run. Waseskun, which has been singled out by Public Safety Canada as a success story, serves only men and has 22 spots reserved for those who were sentenced to terms of more than two years.

However, Indigenous-managed lodges are chronically underfunded, despite being widely identified as a path forward in the relentless quest to reduce Indigenous incarceration rates, said Ivan Zinger, Canada’s prison ombudsman.

And the numbers continue to spike, 25 years after a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision found the over-incarceration of Indigenous offenders amounted to a full-scale crisis in Canada’s justice system.