One month after she was sentenced to 10 years, Catherine McKay was relocated to a healing lodge. McKay was convicted of impaired driving in the death of a family of four in July.
The move has been met with backlash, with many people on social media not understanding the role of healing lodges or their origin.
It’s a topic that is well known to a group of residential school survivors who gathered at the First Nations University of Canada for a two-day conference this week. Healing lodges began as a place to help people — specifically, victims of residential schools — dealing with trauma, grief and addiction.
“People do not just one day say, ‘I am going to commit murder tomorrow,’” Grant Severight, a mental health counsellor, said. “It does not happen that way. It is a process of events, a culmination of anger that explodes into someone getting harmed or hurt.”
Healing lodges are technically available to all minimum-security federal inmates, but in some cases, the facilities don’t mesh with offenders’ religious beliefs.
“They have to have a connection to the Creator,” said addictions counsellor William Crowe-Buffalo. “In today’s society, the connection is either cultural or spiritual.”
The lodges are focused on forcing the inmates to work through whatever demons might be haunting them in a calm, holistic way.
“The resources are there. The people are there,” Crowe-Buffalo said. “There are no more excuses, so people are changing.”
It can be a tough sell for people who want to punish criminals and discourage future crime. There has been significant social media backlash over the decision to move McKay to a healing lodge, but some say she deserves an opportunity to change.
“That woman deserves healing as much as anybody else,” Severight said. “She did not get up that morning and say ‘I am going to go on a highway in a drunken stupor and run into a car and kill four people.’ She did not plan that. What she planned to do was to get drunk to numb the pain she was feeling.”
Based on a report by CTV's Dale Hunter
