The Aboriginal Healing Foundation:
A Nest of Maggots
by Gilbert Oskaboose

The Aboriginal Healing Foundation in Ottawa is staffed by native fat cats and other bottom feeders who have no problem with growing fat feeding off the bodies of Survivors who never made it this far. They died young, often violently, unable to cope with the memories of residential school, unable to adapt, overcome and survive....

You ask them how many of their Directors and staff have ever set foot in one of those infamous residential schools. Last year their fat cat Executive Director bagged over $141,000 for his pain. How much did super Indian Georges Erasmus drag home?

The federal government has thrown 350 million at the problems in Indian Country brought about by native residential schools. It's bastard offspring , the AHF, is now preparing to throw 1-2 hundred thousand at whatever native community is clever enough to get by their bullshit applications and to fight and scramble for the bucks. Exactly the same basic tactic by the same "type" of bureaucracy. Same basic game as the Jesuits flinging out candy into the yard, then laughing at us kids fighting over it.

That 350 million should have went directly to Survivors and their families. The Survivors and their families are the ones who have already paid the bitter price for government and church stupidity and they are the ones that will go on paying until the day they die. Not the fat cat maggots who are now going to profit handsomely from the pain, suffering and humiliation of others.

Who is bullshitting who with all this talk of "healing." Aboriginal Healing Foundation, my ass. We will never heal or recover from this experience. The best we can ever do is survive. Was at a meeting of my own law suit a few weeks back and saw a dignified old elder reduced to tears over an abuse incident that happened to him over 79 years ago. Now there is the truth of it. That the reality.

Band Offices and church-backed groups can set up all the "healing centers" they want. Born-again traditionals can dance about, buck-naked, muttering incantations and casting spells on decent folk until the cows come home. There is no "healing" from this kind of shit. Indian Country will never recover from the time of residential schools, only survive....

Learning languages? Both me and the wife, another survivor, are pushing sixty, a bit late to be trying to learn another language, eh? Counseling Centers? Both of us have learned to bury the pain and live with it. Neither one of us is about to start spilling our guts to some fuzzy-assed kid fresh out of psychiatry school. Had my own shrink a few years back--leading shrink in all of B.C. A few years later my shrink was in court himself defending against charges of abuse by female clients. Hired maggots will grow fat on this handout, not residential school survivors.

We all know what this is all about. It's about native people who have learned to play the juicy government funding game and they have learned to play it well. They know all the right buttons to push and they know how to separate a guilt-ridden government from its bucks. They know all the right words and when and how to say them. They know how to find auditors who will swear by whatever the hell they want them to swear to. Auditors are not stupid. They know which side their bread is buttered on.

And no, I am neither a disgruntled applicant who failed to have his application accepted nor a truculent prospective employee who was not hired by the AHF. Just a native citizen who does not like maggots or the way they go about profiting on the misfortune and pain of their betters.

We have our own private law suit. Justice will be done to some degree. To hell with the federal government and it's idiot stillborn child - the AHF.