For many Indigenous communities across Alberta, the path to healing from the traumas of colonization and residential schools is paved with cultural strength, resilience and support.
The Resolution Support Workforce (RSW), also known as the Trauma-Informed Health and Cultural Support Program (TIHCSP) workforce, is a group of Indigenous community-based workers in Alberta who provide culturally relevant healing support to Indigenous communities.
Leanne Sleigh, a founding member of the RSW in Alberta and part of a key team at Siksika Health Services (SHS) that has been instrumental in advancing the program’s impact, highlights how the RSW is a testament to the resilience of Indigenous culture.
"Our people never lost our culture, we never lost our language," she says. "It still thrives, and it’s a central part of the work we do today in First Nations communities across Alberta."
Through funding by Indigenous Services Canada (ISC), the core purpose of the RSW is to provide mental, emotional, social, and cultural support and resources to survivors of Indian residential schools (IRS) and wider communities as they heal from colonial disruptions and trauma. Through various activities, the workers provide services such as assistance with legal statements; informal intakes for families in need of connecting to health care, education and housing resources; and support for people testifying for IRS survivors and other benefits.
Sleigh, who is also the program co-ordinator for the Traditional Wellness Program at SHS, emphasizes the importance of cultural identity in the group’s work.
“In Alberta, we have the unique ability to work closely with our communities, grounded in our culture and language. As we came together and recognized our diversity, we learned that the most powerful way to support our people was to reconnect them with their identity, their roots,” she says.
Initially known as the IRS Survivors Support Workers, the RSW first emerged in the late 1990s in response to recommendations released by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) to guide the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Canada.
In Alberta, the RSW is a team of more than 60 professionals who are primarily of First Nations and Métis heritage. Members of this group originate from and serve people residing in the territories encompassed by all three Treaty areas in Alberta — Treaties 6, 7 and 8. The Alberta RSW is unique because of language and cultural diversity among the workforce and the communities they serve.
The workers are employed and embedded within 29 different Indigenous-serving organizations who hold Contribution Agreements with the ISC. This means that the workers provide services that are accessible and responsive to emerging community needs across urban, rural and remote settings throughout the province, facilitating proximity to IRS survivors and their descendants in ways that funding structures in other regions may not be able to ensure.
Enhancing support for the Resolution Support Workforce
With the evolution of the workforce, the expansion of their services and the crucial need for their resources in Indigenous communities, RSW workers require support to more critically profile their service to communities and to track impacts to help sustain their efforts.
To understand the needs of this workforce, a University of Calgary team led by Dr. Rita Henderson, PhD, a member of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM), worked with the RSW to author and release a report with recommendations for supporting these workers. Guided Divinely: Workforce Report of the Alberta Region Health and Cultural Support Program highlights the importance of the RSW and provides guidance on strategies at multiple levels to enhance and sustain their efforts.
Key recommendations include funding full-time co-ordination staff, advocating for inter-organizational collaboration and developing measures to track the social return on investment when community needs are met, instead of client needs escalating to other systems such as acute care. The recommendations call for sustainable, long-term funding to support the workforce’s co-ordination and training, emphasizing the importance of collaboration across government, non-profit and community organizations.
“Continuity is a must,” says Sleigh when speaking on the future of the workforce. “The work of the RSW needs to continue because the drive for the workforce is to bring about change. The change is to ensure the sustainability of our culture and language, that is, healing. We must ensure that (colonial erasure) never happens again in our country,” she says.
In advancing the work being done by the RSW, Henderson and the workforce recently received funding from the O’Brien Institute to support continued collaboration. This funding will support the RSW and Henderson’s team in developing an evaluation framework to measure and assess the impact of the workforce using indicators designed and determined by its members. “The project being funded by the O’Brien Institute is meant to be an exercise in self-determination to some extent,” Henderson says.
“It’s an effort to demonstrate that decolonization isn't just about the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and ways in existing systems. It's also about understanding how there are systems in (these) communities that can be strengthened and understood on their own terms and translated to outsiders instead of being transformed for outsiders or by outsiders.”
Henderson hopes that the funding will contribute to a returned focus on Indigenous Peoples and communities when it comes to their healing. “The funding will contribute to outputs that recenter the truth that communities are the experts on their needs," Henderson says. "As professionals in health, medicine and other service fields, we must realize that, while our job is to support those we serve in achieving wellness, we are not the holders of all solutions.”
It is important for the O’Brien Institute to support projects that have a real impact on the day-to-day lives of people and can impact health in many ways, says Dr. Pamela Roach, PhD, deputy director of the Institute. “The significance of funding this research really is the privilege to be able to support work being done by the RSW and Dr. Henderson’s team,” says Roach.
Forging ahead on the path of healing and reconciliation
The RSW remains focused on supporting the healing of Indigenous Peoples and building capacity within community institutions to define what healing can and should look like. According to Sleigh, “the legacy of the IRS is a lifelong journey of healing.”
Sleigh emphasizes the importance of joint participation in reconciliation. “Reconciliation is not just focused on us as Indigenous People. Reconciliation is for everyone and it’s every day, not just on Sept. 30.”
“Reconciliation is about understanding, acceptance and forgiveness. But it’s also walking together and working with one another, hand in hand. I wish for continued success for the work being done already and for unity amongst everyone.”
Indeed, Truth and Reconciliation Commission principles emphasize that this work of reconciliation, which includes supporting healing among Indigenous peoples, is the job of all Canadians.
“If we want to work towards reconciliation and we want to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a society, and, as researchers, we need to contribute where we can in order to support research that meets the needs of communities and responds to their priorities,” says Roach.
This National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, join us in honouring the children who never returned home, the survivors of residential schools, their families and communities, and the workers who are dedicated to supporting their healing.
