Indigenous healing lodges face chronic underfunding across Canada, critics say
Every morning, Indigenous men at the Waseskun Healing Centre north of Montreal gather for a healing circle, where they smudge, share stories and sometimes gain spiritual guidance from elders.
The centre is the equivalent of a minimum-security prison but here, the men are called residents, rather than inmates, prisoners or offenders.
At the end of a healing circle on an early-spring morning, elder Grégoire Canapé shares a teaching.
“There’s this idea of bad apples, of taking the rotten one and throwing it out to save the others. But at the heart of that apple, there’s a seed,” Grégoire says.