 Today we have Joe McQuarrie, M.A.T. Elder, whose mother is from Red River, and if you listen to her as an elder, the Creator will give you a lot of good stuff to take with you. And here she is, Joe McQuarrie. Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I'm very happy to be here, also very nervous to be here. I'll just tell you a little bit about myself. I was recognized as a M.A.T. elder by the M.A.T. Nation of Ontario a few years ago, and I thought I couldn't be an elder because I wasn't old enough. But they said, oh, it's not about age, it's about wisdom. And I thought, oh, I can do that. So I accepted the honour. By day I'm a community outreach liaison with the M.A.T. Nation of Ontario, and by night I represent the M&O at a member of various boards and committees in town. I'm also a member of the Police Services Compact Committee. It's a race relations and diversity group. The committee is made up of representatives from most of the ethnic groups in Ottawa, and it's very lively. And we partner with the police so that if there's a difficulty in a particular community, we usually help to advise the police on what ought to be done, and also we sort of act as a buffer, a support to the community that we're from, and also a buffer between the two because sometimes the police don't always get along with communities that are under stress. I'm also a chaplain with the Police Services Spiritual Team. And I'm from Edmonton. My heritage is Korean and French, and my spirit name is Lady Swan. It was given to me by a Cherokee medicine person, and I haven't met him, but this was emailed to me by that Lady Swan. I've had difficulty finding information about that legendary person or mythic person or spiritual person in the Cherokee legends and mythology, but I think it's because I exhibit a very calm exterior as a swan sailing down the river, but underneath I'm paddling like hell, but anyway. So I think it was suitable. My parents passed away when I was a child. My mother had tuberculosis, and I was away at the sanatorium in Calvary for a long time, and I hadn't seen her since I was five years old. My father passed away when I was twelve, and I went to—I had stayed in a convent. I lived in a convent from the age of five until ten years, and then my brother and I out of the convent, and we lived with him for a couple of years. Since I was an orphan by that time, I went to live with my brother and his family and lived with them until I left to enter nursing school. I'm a registered nurse with postgraduate studies in psychiatric nursing and community development. After I got married, we moved to Baker Lake in the Northwest Territories, where my husband had accepted a job as principal of the day school there, and we stayed. At that time, the Canadian government didn't hire nurses. They imported nurses from Australia and Britain because they were primarily wanting to hire midwives, but there's more to nursing than just midwifery. The school that I trained at was a rural hospital, so we had a lot of experience in delivering babies, but I worked as a volunteer at the nursing station because often my experience was broader than the nurse who was specialized in midwifery, so I did a number of medivacs and whatnot. During the time in the north, I worked primarily with Inuit, but have a lot of experience with working with the Danny as well. I was of course very concerned about mental health services because in the long hours of darkness in the winter, people are prone to become depressed and just unstable and would be shipped out to a hospital in the south, and then when spring came, they would be back. I didn't want that to happen to me. When we moved to Yellowknife, it was the promised land, of course, after living in Baker where there was no communication with the outside. There was no radio or television or anything like that. We still got the Edmonton Journal, but they would be stacked up and we would read them sort of day by day, although they were probably weeks late in coming, but the postal service was also very poor. Anyway, I had always wanted to go north, and one of the things that we thought would be useful for our children would be to grow up as a minority in a community. So I think I'm trying to think of how they were old. We were Catholics, by the way, so my oldest child is a daughter and she was six, and my son was five, and my other son was four. And then I had to go the following year to have our fourth child. I think they appreciated the experience of living in a small community and just sort of morphed into—they didn't know they were different, and I don't think they are really, but it was a good experience for all of us to be there. And people that we met when we stepped off the plane in Baker Lake, I'm very proud to say many of them are still our friends, and some are living in Ottawa these days, so we still have that good connection. So life went on, and in Yellowknife, I, being concerned about mental health services, I didn't know a soul when we went there, and my husband was off at work and I was housebound with my children. And so I thought I'd check around to see what mental health services were available. And the only thing that was available was a psychiatrist from Edmonton, I think, who would come out once a month for a day, and it was less than a day actually, and we'd hear on CBC Radio that the psychiatrist is in, that he was wishing to see him come to the nursing station between these hours. And I had joined a Toastmasters group and really admired the women who were participating in that. They were career women and just wonderful. And by January, they were all shipped out, and I thought, oh dear, that's going to happen to me and I don't want to go. But as it turned out, I phoned around with the help of a nurse that I worked with, I worked nights at the hospital, she knew the community so well, she lived there a long time. And so we phoned around and called together a meeting of people who were interested in addressing the issues of mental health services. And what came of that, I was very enthusiastic about it until the woman from the YWCA said, well, where's the meeting? And I thought, oh, I didn't have a venue. That was how inexperienced I was. But anyway, we had the first meeting at the YWCA in Yellowknife. And out of that came the, we didn't have any money. And to this day, I don't believe that you need money to start an organization. I think that if you have people of even three people who are concerned about mutual items, then you can address it. And I'm a proponent of volunteer services because I believe that volunteers, if you volunteer your time to help somebody, you really are helping yourself. Even if your only return is the feeling of self-satisfaction for having helped somebody. So we started off as the NWT Mental Health Association, which then became the Canadian Mental Health Association of the Northwest Territories. We had a lot of support from the CMHA, but we didn't know if we wanted to even align ourselves with them. We were going to do our own thing. But then it made sense to use their resources, which they generously offered to begin what we wanted to do. And some of the spin-offs from the work of our board of directors was made up of people from across the territories. That was, of course, way before Nunavut. And so I don't know how we did it. CN gave us their free telephone services, and so we were able to communicate by radio phone or telephone. The spin-offs were the detox center that was built and the original name for the detox because our committee was so busy. We were concerned, I think, basically that at night we would have the street people who were intoxicated come to the hospital, but we didn't have beds for them. So they would sleep on mattresses in the hallways. And we had to make extra rounds to make sure that they didn't aspirate or get worse. I was fussing about, well, we need some place to treat them and just an overnight nap on a mattress. It wasn't going to do it. So some businessmen got together and they wanted the liquor, the license to sell liquor. But they said that they would use their profits for this detox, and we envisioned this duplex in detox and detox. But the original name was Joe's Plop House because they thought they were doing me a favor. The next group that we fostered was some of our volunteers who thought that we needed a Montessori school, so that soon developed and I believe is still running. We were also concerned about the disabled people and their ability to get around. And so we formed the Council for Disabled, and they call it something, I think it's the Council for Community Living now, but it's been a terrific success. We also had a distress line, and those are still going. We developed branches in the different communities like Ekelloot and Fort Smith and those places. We were concerned about the building of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, and our concern was that what would happen to our project was called the people and the pipeline. What would happen to the people if the pipeline went through and they're caught in this rapid industrialization for which there was no infrastructure to support them if they did have serious problems or any problems at all? And so I, Mr. Justice Berger, gave me the, I don't know whether it was a curse or a blessing, blessing, blessing, to appear before the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline and the ability to cross-examine the witnesses and make our recommendations to the inquiry. So I didn't travel with them because we had volunteers in the other communities who could speak for themselves about their concerns with rapid industrialization. So I made the arrangements for our various volunteers as Mr. Berger was traveling around to appear before the inquiry, abdicating for the people who would be negatively affected by the building of the pipeline. And in the final report, Mr. Justice Berger included all of our recommendations as well as one of them was to delay the pipeline, the building of the pipeline until the infrastructure was in place so that there would be social services and all the things that people need. And we needed a social infrastructure and services to support the people during the time of the rapid development. And we were very thankful that he, in his final report, he, like we didn't, we weren't protesting the building of the pipeline as much as, let's take care of the people first. And he delayed the building of the pipeline for ten years. And I think it must be 30 or 40 years by now and it's still not built, which is a good thing. My career in the north was, my family was of course the major item in my work. And but I began, I worked for the stand in hospital at night and I also did all kinds of other things. I was on the separate school board and then on the Sir John Franklin school board. And these were building, they were in their infancy and so we had a lot of development to do and things to do in that regard. The, I was the, I moved over to work for the department, it was the Department of Health and Social Services as a mental health consultant. And we hired, we couldn't call them psychiatric nurses, but they really were, but we called them mental health workers. So I had a staff of five and they were in one in each of the regions across the north. That was including Nunavut, of course. One of the things that we found, and you will find quite likely in your research, is that the people in small communities or indigenous people generally still adhere to their cultural beliefs and interpret, like it's not on the surface in a lot of cases. But if you probe deeper, you will find that, well I guess it's like us, we don't believe in all that stuff until there's a crisis. And then we go back to what worked for us in the past and if that is summoning the various spirits to be with us, we can do that. And I think it's like when we're passing on to the next world, we suddenly contact the God or the Creator to help us through, whereas we may not have given God or the Creator a second thought for many years, but we revert back to that old behavior. And if you're researching in those communities, in some communities, and I'm thinking primarily of Aboriginal communities, you have to be very, you have to notice how different, that is their basic belief system is cultural, but they might be, I had a patient once who was, she was a teenager from one of the communities and she had, she was just an ordinary teenager, she was going to high school out of Cachill Hall and she, she became pregnant and we got her in for the delivery and she was healthy. Oh, she was a beautiful woman and just so healthy and like her delivery should have just gone like clockwork, but she began labor and properly, but then stopped and we had to do a C-section and when she was conscious, she rejected her baby, she didn't want to see it, she didn't want to talk to us, she wanted to do anything, she did not want to do anything, but we had, and we had to get her up every day, like she wouldn't eat or drink or do any of the things that you're supposed to do after surgery and it was, would take two or three of us to get her out of bed and drag her down the hallway because she had to move and it was really disconcerting for us and so I happened to go back to the hospital after supper one night to see how she was doing and there was, she had a visitor who was a nurse from the community that she was from and the nurse said, well, you know, you must know of the curse. No, didn't know it, but apparently there is a community or was a community that had some medicine people who were active, they were, they practiced good medicine and bad medicine and one of the bad medicine workers had laid a curse on this because they had a dispute with their parents and the curse was that she would, she would have her baby, but she would have to go through a very difficult period and actually the baby would live, but it had to do this and that and the other thing. So her family contacted the good medicine people in the community and said, look, you know, what can we do? And they studied the case and they said there wasn't anything they could do because the the medicine was too powerful for them and but they could, you know, the baby would be alive. She would probably suffer for three or four days, but after that she would be fine. So once we knew that our attitude as nurses just totally changed. We were really sympathetic. We sort of were before, but also frustrated by the fact that she didn't respond to our wonderful nursing care. But but as the third day rolled around, she, it was the fourth day that she really was alive and happy and wanted to see her baby, wanted to do all the things that mothers wanted to do and we were totally amazed. And I felt always that we should have had that information beforehand and I found it was the same with some of the mentally ill people that came across my path. There was a woman from one of the communities who every spring during the ratting season, she was shipped out to the mental hospital in Edmonton and she was coming through and her daughter called me to say that she didn't want her mother to, she had to wait for a plane for about eight hours. She didn't want her mother to be in jail during that time and could I, she could stay at the hospital and her daughter could stay with her. So I phoned around and so anyway, the the police agreed that she probably, jail wasn't a place for her. So she, I got the story from the daughter finally who said that well she goes out every year because a few years back she had bought medicine from a medicine person in the community so that she would have good luck and success during the ratting season and the deal was that she was to return that medicine to the medicine person at the, you know, after a few years but if she didn't it would curse her. So one year while she was out in the bush, the medicine person died so she didn't have an opportunity to return the medicine so she believed she was cursed during the ratting season and the community were afraid of her. I think she was afraid of herself so by the time I got this story was she was already had been admitted to the hospital. I had phoned the community to the parish priest to see if there was something they could do in the community like a ceremony of some kind that would release that that medicine or that that curse and he said oh no we don't believe in that that's nonsense you know she's a good catholic woman she's at church every day blah blah blah so I looked further and what had happened was that she had attacked her husband with an axe. She was and that's why she was being shipped out well other reasons I guess but this was kind of the last straw. He was admitted to the nursing station in that community and she was taken off to Edmonton. So I phoned the psychiatrist and he said oh I'm just meeting with her she's a lovely woman and I said well did you get her chart in her history? Oh that's not necessary she's been here before and so I said well did you know and he said oh that can't be true she speaks English well and she's making a belt beating a belt for me. I thought I was so you know get real a guy you don't know who you're dealing with and anyway to make a long story short she got well came back the community welcomed her back but they were still uneasy during the ratting season and when one year I had been working with an RCMP guy so he had the whole story but as it turned out one year I heard on cbc radio because that's all we got up there that she had disappeared and she had gone ratting with two of her nephews and they didn't know what happened to her she just sort of disappeared and he and I both agreed that it was probably a ritual murder I think the community had finally gotten tired of this and of being afraid and this whole thing repeating year after year and it's just unfortunate that they they had enough resources in the community in terms of the medicine people and who know all about this kind of thing to have lifted that that curse from her and she'd probably still be alive today so those are the kinds of things that we dealt with as a mental health organization and also as we also did the first mental health study in the north and there were two researchers from the University of Saskatchewan who donated their time to meet with our board to sit down and develop a questionnaire that was suitable to the communities that would be assessed the we hired individuals in the in the community to go door to door with the questionnaires we also had them these researchers meet with the community beforehand to to let them know what it was all about and to get their their support in order to carry this out when the and we ensured that the results were received a proper vetting by our board of directors which as I mentioned was made up of all these different representatives from across the north so it was very effective and we began get after it was over and the researchers went back to their to their community the people in each of the communities are calling us and saying well can't you get another grant we they really enjoyed having these people come to their to their homes to interview them and they missed the visit and the cups of tea and whatnot and especially in the winter and so it was very very successful another survey that we did just in the delta in the western Arctic was on how the people looked at mental health because they were the people in the western Arctic didn't have the difficulties that the people on the west coast of Hudson Bay had and they and the Inuit look at mental illness in a totally different manner and it's really important that you know how the community regards them this this illness there were more suicides in the eastern Arctic than there were in the west and in asking around like why is this like there were literally none in the Cambridge Bay area and and it was because there was a road out people weren't totally cut off from the south they could get in their truck or whatever and and go to Edmonton or wherever just to to get out and so that was a theory on one of my other adventures I was chief coroner in the northwest territories for a number of years and we kept statistics on suicides and the we had it's a lay coroner system there and we had coroners indigenous coroners in each of the communities across the north and it was a very difficult job for them because they would be dealing with people well their neighbors and relatives who they'd known all their lives and all we had to give them for their trouble was a $50 stipend and they wouldn't take it for the most part because they felt that they didn't want to make any money from the misery of of the people that they were dealing with so it was a very good system we held a number of of inquests into the deaths just to ensure that people knew you know how rumors develop and spread and whatnot and and often it's totally based on poor information or none at all and I held an inquest into the death of a a noblet priest who was found dead in the basement of the church and he had all kinds of scratches on his body that can't really reach but they were really deep and whatnot and some people thought that he had been murdered and the church is and a lot of people saw him because he didn't come up her mouth that morning and some of them went down to see him and saw his body we shipped him out for an autopsy of course but it was a suicide he had his stomach was just packed with 292s and whatnot and they hadn't even had time to digest I guess but anyway we felt the church said he had oh you know poor father he died of a heart attack he worked so hard for you guys blah blah blah so we had to in consultation with the church in Yellowknife we felt that we had to set the record straight and so we did have a I got a poison pen letter from an noblet priest somewhere who said that the obelisk had been in in power not in power but in you know preaching the gospel for 300 years and they had never ever had a suicide so what are you talking about Lee I thought oh you got one now but anyway so I woke up one morning thinking to myself oh and in the meantime I became a politician I was on city council for a number of years and the and then I left to develop the health boards in the katecmiot and the kiwetan regions my mandate with the department from the Department of Health was well just go to rank and and see what you can do I mean do what you think is best and I had never had a mandate like that and I thought why not so off I went but the the federal government was developing health services to the territorial government and the territorial government didn't want them so they devolved them to the Inuit and I was supposed to go over and tell them that but the person who ran northern health from Churchill in the kiwetan thought that I was a female activist of some kind who was just there to ruin his life fortunately the Inuit welcomed me and but they couldn't believe that they would have the ability to change their to run their own health services they just couldn't realize that yeah it's yours you can hire and fire and do all these things and improve your health services and it went on and so it took me two years in the kiwetan region to reactivate the local health committees and to set up the board and the the people who were the Inuit who were involved were were just just phenomenal and they were volunteers too they were just so concerned about the level of health services they were receiving so after we got staff hired for for the for the board I went over to the critique me at region that's Cambridge Bay to do the same thing there and it didn't take me quite as long because I kind of knew what I was doing so and the people were were very receptive to taking over the health services I've heard that it's since gone I mean it functioned very well for a number of years but then the Nunavut government decided they wanted wanted to run things from Iqaluit and somehow it's not the local people don't have the the same amount of authority that they had back then when they were doing it themselves the um and at my last job in the north was as I was on city council when I came back from the regions to Yolanei the council the since I had been a one of the Alderman was leaving midterm and so the city council asked me if I would fill out that term just so that they could avoid a by-election so I thought I would do that and so I did the the other thing and I was on the the hospital board as well so anyway life sort of settled back into the away from the communities the after being a coroner for so long I woke up one morning and I thought there must be more to life than death and so I decided that I would go back home to Edmonton because my while I was in the north my nieces and nephews had grown up and were getting married and I had kind of lost track of some of the years that I would have shared with them had I stayed home but um and sort of retirement was on the horizon too and uh anywhere I went home I went back to Edmonton and I had always wanted a five-bedroom house in the suburbs so I bought one myself and my two cats moved in we had lots of visitors and but uh then the I think the Inuit probably realized that I had left the north and I had three job offers in Ottawa one was from ITK another was the uh they're Daniel are beginning to send uh patients out here but they needed a the uh the hospital needed a nurse to help them settle in and all that stuff and also I had been working with a guy in Edmonton to prepare a proposal for the building of um Largo Baffin house here and uh he said that once it was built which would take a couple of years he wanted me to manage it so I had no idea no desire to leave my five-bedroom house there's a lot of maintenance to five-bedroom home so but um but I thought it might be a sign I wasn't looking for work and these three requests came in and so I decided that I would take the job with ITK and uh so that's how I came to Ottawa they uh were moving their health services from um Pactuti to to under their their umbrella so and I didn't know that there were um some issues there I thought it was just you know what they decided to do but as it turned out um I set up their their health uh programs for them and um we held the first uh Inuit um meeting with with the government and in preparation for this meeting uh we um we wanted to develop um a partnership with uh Health Canada but the people I was working with on the committee um Health Canada people uh said no no no it's not a partnership it's a relationship but I had so we developed this proposal and I had last say on um the last edit so I just took out relationship and put in partnership and so Alan Rock was the minister at the time so when he was opening the uh the conference he said um oh and this is the first meeting we've had with the the Inuit and our partnership is going to thrive and so anyway and it did so anyway the um I was there for quite a while and uh then moved to um I discovered I was an IT and I thought I should go and help those people and um so I went to one of the social gatherings at MNO and uh even met some relatives that I didn't know I had and um and so I took a contract with them to look at um I thought they should address the mental health issues and provide training for their staff so my two recommendations that were very well received was that um one was they needed to do research in Métis mental health and they also needed to train their staff in basic mental health so that when a client came through the door they could assess them and know what they who they were dealing with and and what the illness possibly was and um those two um the training is going on all these years later and the um I lived just before they oh I went on staff with them and worked in family violence and you know all those other things the um the training is still going on and is it's wonderful they uh um the attendance at these training sessions is mandatory and it works so I think that's all you need to know about the life and times um I'm only 12 by the way looking forward to my teen years but I just wanted to tell you about the um the Métis nation of Ontario I don't know how my time is it is it up five minutes oh I can't do it but um the um I think when I started with M&O uh in 2005 they were um they had offices in about 20 communities across Ontario and uh they uh they were wanting to preserve the culture and language of of the Métis and also uh start programs and that Métis could participate in as well as others are uh were status-blind apparently and to fulfill the uh principles of uh uh prime purpose that the um organization had uh laid out the um there's just one more thing um we're actually talking about research ethics and I had a page of that um anyway uh today they're they're really um they blossomed and uh Tony Belcourt was here yesterday and Tony is the founder of the Métis Nation of Ontario um he's so knowledgeable but he the first uh M&O office was in his attic in his house and uh he was donating his time and so was everybody else to build this organization and it's just uh just phenomenal if I have three minutes left John I'll just say that in terms of ethical research I'd suggest that um guidelines ought to be in place to assist the research to learn about the protocol that is in place in the community that they plan to work in contacts in the community uh prior to going in should be made such as uh preparing yourself to to know what you're getting into and have knowledge of the community and its residents and its and its history and its belief system and uh so that you don't make any mistakes um and uh meet with the local councils when we say that uh you know yesterday the word community came up another thing that came up yesterday was what if what if we don't uh what if we just go in and do the research and get out and they never hear from us again well you will never hear from them either and try getting back in um it's really important to tread lightly and to do your work with the community as carefully as possible and maybe even form a little um uh a mini committee from that community to to back you up and to advise you um and you need to determine what the etiquette uh what etiquette is acceptable in the community um in denny communities uh at band meetings if like the men uh and I don't think things have changed um the men sit at the table and the the elders sit at the back of the room and anybody else that's sort of on the sidelines or they never you never go to the table unless you're invited and um and you need to realize that although the men are sitting at the table it's those elders at the who are making the decisions and using incredible sign language and uh so they're directing the meeting and I recall one little sweetie pie she wasn't a researcher she was just a southerner just came in and sit a briefcase down on the chair at the table and sat down the room was just silent and um she just didn't know and it was unfortunate because I think she meant well and she wanted to do a good job of whatever she was doing and then she also advised the chairman of that committee she gave him advice that he didn't want or need because he was busy focusing on the old women but it was just major difficulty and in terms of your questionnaire had the local people assist you um in developing the questionnaire in some communities you um they don't appreciate questions being asked of um elderly people or even sort of a stages of development that questions are appropriate to be asked by someone who um like you couldn't ask an elderly man if he still slept with his wife I mean you might be worried about well do they have enough bed space or the room ventilated well and this kind of thing but it's so inappropriate that your research would be over and uh it would also be the talk of the community that this is on your questionnaire and of course the question from the community was does he know and and also it is so important to uh to be careful of what you're asking and in the way it's being asked because that could be bad news for you if if you weren't careful and knowledgeable and I think that's my time and uh I could probably send you this I'll give it to Laura so that she can send it on to you so that you get to know the M&O well thank you