A Langford-based family and community services society is using artistic innovation to tackle the topic of truth and reconciliation while raising money to reduce a long waitlist for counselling services.
Hulitan Family & Community Services Society on Station Avenue serves the Indigenous community in supporting healing and fostering resilience through culturally rooted programs.
One of the services Hulitan provides is counselling, but executive director Kendra Gage said the waitlist is currently four years.
“There are 100 children waiting for services on our waitlist,” Gage said. “We have people banging on our door to work here. We just can’t get the funding to pay them.”
In response, the organization started its own Every Child Matters Every Day Campaign, creating their own line of swag that can be worn year-round. The logo was created and gifted to Hulitan by artist Maxwxeadziy-Geo Shaughnessy and depicts an eagle that has transformed over time after residential schools were closed. Shaughnessy’s mother spent some of her childhood years at St. Michael’s residential school in Alert Bay.
All the profits go into a fund to support families who need access to counselling or cultural interventions that they can’t afford.
“We want people to wear these all the time and remember the legacy of residential schools, and truth and reconciliation is us thinking about this every day – not just on the 30th of September,” Gage said.
Creating the campaign while highlighting the work of a local artist is just one of the many ways the organization uses art to bring healing to the community.
Under Gage’s leadership, Hulitan is also in partnership with Deluxe Communications to produce a documentary that will tell individual stories of residential school survivors, while exploring the collective voice of the Indigenous experience. The film also is a call to all Canadians to embark on the process of reconciliation. Deluxe Communications is run by Geraldine Glattstein, an Indigenous political and social activist.
“Sometimes we use films in programming,” Gage said. “We have the Family Presentation Reunification Program and part of that program is families being able to do their healing and looking at impacts [of residential schools]. Even though it’s assumed all Indigenous people know the impact of residential schools and colonization, that’s actually not true. We have to raise awareness in our own communities, and we use film sometimes as a starting point to have a more difficult conversation. It creates an opportunity for people to see themselves externally from their own experience.”
The film is currently in production and the lion’s share of the budget is secured.
Glattstein has praised Gage’s leadership, which she describes as bold, and the way the organization honours Indigenous culture. One example she cited was that when resident Elder Mickey Cook died recently this month, the office closed down for an entire week to pay its respects.
“It’s so organic how they run that place. It makes my heart beat faster,” Glattstein said. “It’s an agency run with a head and a heart.”
Gage said the arts are important to the culture of their organization, playing an important role in healing. Indigenous art fills the walls at Hulitan, arguably the most striking of which is the seven-foot-tall cedar panels in the Big House, a room that hosts community and cultural meetings. The panels serve as a visual representation of the four pillars of the organization: connectedness, respect, humility and integrity.
“I think everybody has the right to be somewhere where there is beauty around them, and we’ve made the decision to reflect the beauty of the diversity of Indigenous cultures in our art,” Gage said.
“A sense of belonging is foundational to every human being, and when you’re able to see yourself in the things around you and connect with those things, it creates a sense of belonging that is crucial to healing.”
READ MORE: ‘These are our lands’: B.C. First Nation chief on Truth & Reconciliation Day
